Joe Biden says he is not running for president

by Daniel Chaitin | Feb 28, 2018, 6:13 PM

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Tuesday that the Justice Department’s inspector general will investigate alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a move condemned by President Trump on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

A group of 13 Republican lawmakers have signed on to a letter asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appoint a second special counsel to investigate concerns they have with the Justice Department and FBI.The lawmakers say this special counsel would look into agency leadership decisions to end the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized private email server, the circumstances surrounding the genesis of the Trump-Russia investigation, and allegations in a recently released House Intelligence Committee memo regarding government surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

“It’s simple: We’ve learned deeply concerning information on FISA abuses, the dossier, former high-level FBI officials, and more—and it stinks to high heaven. Americans deserve the truth,” tweeted Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the chair of the House Freedom Caucus and one of the signees of the letter.

Many Republicans in recent months have sounded the alarm about potential bias in the DOJ and FBI.

Exacerbating those concerns, the House Intelligence Committee memo asserted that the “Trump dossier,” which contains salacious and unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia, was an “essential” part of the surveillance application to spy on Page. However, the Democratic rebuttal memo, released in redacted form over the weekend, said it “played no role” in the FBI launching its Russia probe, which is now led by special counsel Robert Mueller.

The Democratic memo, however, did leave some other concerns raised by the GOP memo, spearheaded by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., unanswered.

While the lawmakers who signed on to the letter say, on balance, the employees of the agencies do admirable work, a special counsel is needed to weed out the bad ones.

“We acknowledge with immense gratitude that nearly every single man and woman in the DOJ and FBI conducts themselves daily with integrity, independence, patriotism, objectivity and commitment to the rule of law,” the lawmakers wrote. “That is why this Special Counsel is of the utmost importance to ensure that these historic, legendary and necessary agencies move forward more respected and effective than ever before.”

The letter comes one day after Sessions said that his Justice Department’s inspector general will investigate the alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — a move condemned by President Trump on Wednesday.

“Why is A.G. Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse,” Trump tweeted. “Will take forever, has no prosecutorial power and already late with reports on Comey etc. Isn’t the I.G. an Obama guy? Why not use Justice Department lawyers? DISGRACEFUL!”

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, responded to that tweet, questioning why a FISA investigation is needed at all.

“More important question: Why is the AG asking for a FISA investigation at all? DOJ and FBI already said the Nunes memo was inaccurate, misleading and extraordinarily reckless. With no evidence of abuse, only explanation is political pressure,” Schiff

Americans should be reassured that the federal law enforcement agencies are working to keep America safer rather than focused on revenge against political enemies.

By Mollie Hemingway

JANUARY 24, 2018

It is long past time for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appoint a special counsel to investigate the possibility of widespread and systematic corruption, obstruction, leaking, and collusion within America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The leadership of the FBI and Department of Justice have made clear, through their ongoing obstruction of congressional investigations and oversight, that these agencies simply can not be trusted to investigate or police themselves.

Robert S. Mueller III was appointed as a special counsel to make sure that any investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign was independent and impartial. In the same way, it is necessary for an independent special counsel to investigate alleged corruption at the FBI and Department of Justice, so the American public can once again be assured that the federal law enforcement agencies are in fact working to keep America safer rather than focused on getting revenge against political enemies.

To recap, we’ve seen the following startling developments in just the past few days:

The revelation that two key FBI agents, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, sent each other more than 50,000 texts about their work, including regarding the Clinton and Russia probes. Strzok, the former deputy assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division, ran the Clinton investigation and interviewed key witnesses. He was also involved in the Russia investigation.

That five months of texts between these agents are missing. The bureau claims, in the latest of strange coincidences affecting the investigation, that a technical error resulted in a failure to capture these important texts.

The suspicious timing of the missing texts — from shortly after the election to the day that Mueller was named special counsel. These months were full of leaks from intelligence officials about the Russia probe.

That these 50,000-plus texts aren’t even all of their texts, but just those related to the ongoing Office of Inspector General investigation. The FBI and DOJ are not sharing texts that are personal or about other cases. Since the Office of Inspector General hasn’t said it’s reviewing Russia or dossier-related cases, that leaves a lot of texts yet to be disclosed and examined by investigators.

That Comey’s implausible claim to have waited until after interviewing Hillary Clinton to decide to let her off the hook for mishandling classified information is contradicted by additional available evidence.

That Attorney General Loretta Lynch only made her claim that she would defer to the FBI on prosecuting Clinton because she knew Comey would let her off, according to Page.

The existence of a four-page memo compiled by the House Select Permanent Committee on Intelligence alleging surveillance abuse by the FBI against Trump affiliates.

These revelations are not wild speculation but based on concrete evidence that the FBI and DOJ fought tooth and nail against releasing.

Previous months saw startling allegations about the use of a scurrilous dossier to secure a wiretap against a Trump affiliate, the use of that dossier to brief congressional committees, the leaking of the existence of the dossier despite its lack of corroboration, statements that the FBI probe was an “insurance policy” because “we can’t take that risk” that Trump would be elected, and that the dossier itself was funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. There were also criminal leaks of top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) communications. This to say nothing of the widespread unmasking, distribution, and illegal leaking of surveillance information.

It is vital to a democratic republic that the public have faith in their law enforcement institutions. All of these developments feed the perception that there are two different law enforcement regimes — one for friends, and one for enemies. There are clear signs that Clinton benefited from a different set of rules that applied to her that didn’t apply to anyone else. There are also signs that people in federal agencies improperly used spy powers to spin up investigations and special counsels to go after political enemies.

That can’t happen.

Why A Second Special Counsel?

The current special counsel probably should have been investigating the FBI and DOJ as part of his charge into the Russia probe. Mueller has been on the case since May, and should have seen enough shortly thereafter to be concerned about various agencies’ handling of the probes.

But it also shouldn’t be surprising that he has not done much, if anything, to probe the FBI and DOJ. Mueller is the former head of the FBI and very close to Comey. Nobody can be expected to investigate his own friends and family, and asking Mueller to seriously tackle the problems that have been revealed regarding his friends at his old agency is unrealistic.

Similarly, an investigation into all these allegations can’t be done by a U.S. attorney, because it has to be removed from the oversight of those who have run the department for the last several years, since they will be the ones being investigated.

An investigation into all of these allegations can’t be done solely by Congress, either. As Rep. Trey Gowdy said this week, while Congress has a great deal of authority and ability to do general statutory oversight, it’s not an institution that is equipped or designed to do the nitty gritty of law enforcement. A proper investigation will serve warrants and be able to generate quick responses to subpoenas. Congress has been unable to get the FBI or DOJ to quickly comply with requests for information, sometimes waiting months or more for meager responses. This investigation requires an institution and person with authority, institutional expertise, and the tools necessary to get to the bottom of problems at Justice.

Schiff’s Case For a Special Counsel

Even Democrats have been making a good case for a special counsel, however inadvertently. When asked on CNN why the American public couldn’t just see the House Intelligence Committee memo alleging surveillance abuses, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Americans couldn’t handle it without knowing the underlying information that was too sensitive to release. He also suggested that public demand to see the memo, which has been high, was actually just another Russian operation. That turned out to be false.

But if it’s true that controversial information about the FBI’s handling of the Russia probe is too sensitive and could be misconstrued — so sensitive that Schiff voted to keep the rest of Congress in the dark about it and is fighting to make sure the public doesn’t see this information — that means it’s important enough to demand a special prosecutor.

The Leakers’ Case For a Special Counsel

As damaging and discrediting news about “potential corruption at highest levels” came out this week, leaks about the Mueller investigation started coming out. These included that FBI Director Christopher Wray reportedly threatened to resign; that Sessions was interviewed by the Mueller probe, that Mueller is ready to interview Trump, that Russian bots are the real culprits behind public demand to see the surveillance memo, that Trump reportedly asked controversial FBI official Andrew McCabe who McCabe voted for, and various other items.

These leaks tend to happen when bad news threatens the Mueller probe. But they’re perhaps ill-advised, only suggesting all the more to the politicized nature of the current investigation. A special counsel should not be seen as a threat to the Mueller probe but as a necessary help.

An investigation into potential corruption will help preserve or restore confidence in the Mueller investigation. If the results of the Mueller investigation are to be taken seriously, these questions have to be addressed. High-ranking FBI agents are in their own words undermining the entire purpose of the Mueller investigation, such as when Strzok said there’s nothing to the Russia probe prior to joining the special counsel team. Or when he had to be kicked off the team because of how his texts pointed to corruption.

Because the Mueller investigation itself was brought about by a Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research document, which the FBI used despite it not being verified, as well as Comey’s leaks of classified information in retaliation for being fired, the entire investigation has a cloud over it. A special counsel could clear the air or provide clarity regarding the trustworthiness of the Mueller probe. A failure to investigate these charges would damage the country’s ability to have any objective investigation into abuses of power in the future.

The political and media arms of the Democratic Party attempt to downplay the scandal, but it’s only getting worse with each new piece of information that is brought to light. The American people need to know that the attorney general cares about the charges, wants to get to the bottom of the problems, and will work to restore the integrity of this important department. The criminalization of politics in this country is undermining confidence in the republic itself.

If there are good explanations for all of these strange coincidences and lapses in judgment, the American people need to be told. If there is systematic corruption, that needs to be learned as well.

A special counsel who is not part of the current club at the top of these agencies should be appointed. The individual needs to be unimpeachable and a person of integrity who has the strength to take on an incalcitrant bureaucracy and establishment. He or she should have experience in investigating and rooting out corruption in bureaucratic agencies.

Story 2: Trump Take Guns Before Due Process Comment Betrays Bill of Rights Voter Base — In Your Heart You Know He Is Nuts — Never Mind — Governments Many Failures in Parkland Florida Shootings — American People Have The Absolute Right To Defend Themselves Against Tyrants, Criminals and Nuts — Videos

Gun control measures proposed by Trump

Trump: Take the guns first, go through due process second

President Trump Meets with Bipartisan Members of Congress to Discuss School and Community Safety

The National Rifle Association on Wednesday blasted President Donald Trump for his proposal to take guns away from dangerous individual even if it violates constitutional rights to due process.

Trump made the remarks during a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers at the White House to discuss safety measures in the wake of last week’s mass shooting at a high school in Florida.

‘While today’s meeting made for great TV, the gun control proposals discussed would make for bad policy that would not keep our children safe,’ NRA spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said in a statement to The Hill.

‘Instead of punishing law-abiding gun owners for the acts of a deranged lunatic our leaders should pass meaningful reforms that would actually prevent future tragedies.’

The National Rifle Association on Wednesday blasted President Donald Trump for his proposal to take guns away from dangerous individual even if it violates constitutional rights to due process

Baker said that preventing mass shootings would best be done by addressing the country’s mental health system and boosting background checks so that psychologically ill people are prevented from obtaining a gun.

The NRA spokeswoman said that her organization has always supported policies that promote school safety.

‘Whether you love or hate firearms, we all want to send our children to safe schools and to live in safe communities,’ she said.

But Baker added that this can be done without ‘shifting the focus, blame or burden onto safe, law-abiding gun owners.’

‘Doing everything we can as a nation to address the problem of dangerous people committing heinous acts is not inconsistent with the Second Amendment – the systemic failures of government to keep us safe reinforces the need for the Second Amendment,’ she said.

‘We will continue to support legislative efforts to make our schools and communities safe and oppose gun control schemes that cannot keep us safe and only punish law-abiding Americans.’

Trump angered the NRA earlier on Wednesday, saying he will be giving ‘very serious thought’ to signing legislation that lifts the minimum age for purchasing certain firearms like the AR-15 to 21.

The position is a serious split from the organization, which has been a major backer of Trump’s and most Republicans.

In a listening session with lawmakers on Wednesday, the president acknowledged that his posture wouldn’t be popular with the gun group, but he’ll be ‘giving it a lot of consideration’ anyway.

Trump demanded to know why background check legislation that he wants to use as a vehicle for gun violence prevention measures doesn’t already contain the provision.

‘You know why? Because you’re afraid of the NRA!’ the president told Sen. Pat Toomey, the Republican author of the bipartisan bill, with a laugh.

President Donald Trump (seen right with Senator John Cornyn, the Republican from Texas) said he will be giving ‘very serious thought’ to signing legislation that lifts the minimum age for purchasing firearms like the AR-15 to 21

‘You know why? Because you’re afraid of the NRA!’ the president told Sen. Pat Toomey, the Republican author of the bipartisan bill, with a laugh

The Pennsylvania lawmaker explained that five years ago, when the legislation first came for a vote in the Senate, an age restriction never came up.

Toomey also argued that the ‘vast majority’ of teens in his state are non-violent.

But the president made clear that he wants Toomey and cosponsor Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, to include the measure in the universal background check bill they plan to revive in the Senate.

The measure failed in a Democratically-controlled 2013, even though it had the backing of 54 senators, because it did not reach the upper chamber’s 60-vote threshhold.

That was roughly four months after the horrific slaughter of 20 elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut.

One lawmaker told Trump on Wednesday not to underestimate the power of the gun lobby as the president said over and over again that he couldn’t understand why action was not taken under the previous administration.

‘They have great power over you people,’ Trump replied. ‘Some of you people are petrified of the NRA.’

The president said he told the Second Amendment group, ‘We have to do what’s right.’

Trump said that he truly believes that the NRA also wants to do ‘what’s right’ for Americans.

‘I’m a big fan of the NRA. These are great people. These are great patriots. They love our country. But that doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything,’ the president told legislators.

Earlier on in the session, Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from the state that endured the horrible tragedy five years ago that inspired Toomey’s failed background check bill, informed Trump that he would have to take on the NRA if he wanted substantive legislation to pass.

‘There is no other issue out there with the American public like background checks. Ninety-seven percent of Americans want universal background checks. And yet we can’t get it done, there’s nothing else like that. Where it works, people want it and we can’t do it,’ Murphy told the president.

Video playing bottom right…

One lawmaker told Trump on Wednesday not to underestimate the power of the gun lobby as the president said over and over again that he couldn’t understand why action was not taken under the previous administration

Asked if he’d sign legislation making 21 the floor for buying certain firearms, Trump said,’I’ll tell you what, I’m going to give it a lot of consideration, and I’m the one bringing it up, and a lot of people don’t even want to bring it up because they’re afraid to bring it up

Trump rebutted, ‘But you have a different president now.’

To which Murphy said, ‘The reason that nothing has gotten done here is because the gun lobby has had veto power over any legislation that comes before Congress .

‘I wish that wasn’t the case, but it is. If all we end up doing is stuff the gun industry supports than this just isn’t worth it, we’re not going to make a difference,’ he told the Republican president, ‘so I’m glad that you sat down with the NRA, but we will get 60 votes on a bill that looks like the Manchin-Toomey compromise on background checks if you, Mr. President, support it.’

The Connecticut Democrat told Trump: ‘If you come to Congress, if you come to Republicans and say we’re going to do a Manchin-Toomey-like bill to get comprehensive background checks, it will pass.

‘But if this meeting ends up with just sort of vague notions of future compromise than nothing will happen.’

Murphy explained that comprehensive background check legislation would have to bar criminals, people who are very mentally ill and individuals on the terrorist watchlist from purchasing guns.

‘But Mr. President it’s going to have to be you that brings the Republicans to the table on this because, right now, the gun lobby would stop it in its tracks,’ he said.

Trump told him, ‘I like that responsibility Chris, I really do. I think it’s time, it’s time that a president stepped up. I’m talking Democrat and Republican presidents, they haven’t stepped up.’

The president urged lawmakers in the room to come up with compromise legislation that encapsulates universal background checks and strengthens the existing system.

He told them he’d like to see age limits included in the merger, as well.

Asked if he’d sign legislation making 21 the floor for buying certain firearms, Trump said,’I’ll tell you what, I’m going to give it a lot of consideration, and I’m the one bringing it up, and a lot of people don’t even want to bring it up because they’re afraid to bring it up.

‘But I will give very serious thought to it,’ he said.

The president said he wants lawmakers to put together ‘something great.’

The president urged lawmakers in the room to come up with compromise legislation that encapsulates universal background checks and strengthens the existing system

Wednesday was the first time that Trump heard from federal lawmakers leading the charge for new gun violence prevention measures in person since the Parkland massacre

At one point, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat from California, was elated when it appeared that Trump expressed support for gun control measures for which she has long advocated.

‘Joe, can you do that? Can you add some of the things?’ Trump asked Manchin.

‘We’re going to get it passed,’ the president said.

During the meeting, Feinstein pressed Trump to endorse an assault weapons ban, but Trump told her she needed to work it out with her colleagues.

He would not go beyond his support for the age restrictions, background checks and concealed carry permits for teachers trained to wield firearms.

Making a reference to his proposal to allowed teachers to pack heat, Trump said, ‘To me something great, is where you stop it from happening, and I think there’s only one way.’

If lawmakers feel that’s the wrong way to attack the problem, Trump told them, ;I want a very strong counter punch.’

Trump predicted a ‘very successful vote’ this time around on gun control legislation.

‘Some people aren’t going to like that, but you’re going to have to look at that very seriously,’ he said, returning to age limits. ‘And I will sign it, and I will call whoever you want me to if I like what you’re doing, and I think I like what you’re doing already, but you can add to it.

‘But you have to be very, very powerful on background checks – don’t be shy – very strong on mentally ill, you have to be very very strong on that, and don’t worry about bump stock, we’re getting rid of it, I mean you don’t have to complicate the bill by adding another two paragraphs.’

The president claimed once again that his administration would be banning the firearms accessory that it plans to recategorize as a machine gun.

‘We’re getting rid of it. I’ll do that myself because I’m able to. Fortunately we’re able to do that without going through Congress,’ he asserted.

Wednesday was the first time that Trump heard from federal lawmakers leading the charge for new gun violence prevention measures in person since the Parkland massacre.

In addition to Machin, Toomey, Feinstein and Murphy, Sen. John Cornyn, the GOP whip in the Senate, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio also attended.

Cornyn described President Trump’s meeting about guns today as ‘fascinating television’ and ‘surreal.’

‘My takeaway is that we like to start with background checks and build from there and see where we can get consensus,’ the Texas Republican said.

Cornyn, the Senate’s whip who was seated next to Trump during the meeting, added that rolling multiple gun bills into one was ‘easier said than done.’

The Sunshine State’s Democratic senator, Bill Nelson, says he was not invited.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to DailyMail.com’s request for comment on the snub.

A chagrined Nelson told reporters Wednesday afternoon that he was not invited to the president’s chat today with legislators at the White House.

‘I don’t know why I wasn’t invited,’ he said, according to ABC News. ‘And of course that doesn’t foster bipartisanship when you’re trying to solve a problem.’

Trump has been holding listening sessions with parents, students, teachers, state and local officials, law enforcement officers and other stakeholders in the gun control debate, including the National Rifle Association, in the weeks since the Marjory Stoneman massacre.

Yesterday, the White House promised to unveil a set of ‘school safety’ recommendations later this week that will include specific policy initiatives.

The president was already supporting legislation that would incentivize states and agencies to fully comply with existing federal background check mandates. His White House also endorsed a bill this week that funds gun violence prevention training for teachers, law enforcement and students.

Trump last week directed his attorney general to find a way to regulate bump stocks, claiming this week that regardless of what Congress has to say about the matter he’s ‘getting rid’ of the accessory that manipulates semiautomatic rifles.

Other suggestions the president has made had been just that, with the White House pledging hardened stances on Tuesday by the end of the week.

Among those: the proposal to raise the minimum age for some gun purchases and a proposition to allow upwards of 700,000 teachers to carry concealed weapons.

Neither of the proposed remedies to gun violence was gaining traction on Capitol Hill this week as Congress returned from a week-long hiatus.

Sarah Sanders denies that Trump softened stance on gun age limit

A top GOP congressional aide told DailyMail.com on Tuesday that the prospects are ‘pretty dim,’ for age limits that could be why the president appeared to be backing away from it in remarks over the past few days.

‘That proposal won’t get a lot of traction in Congress,’ the source said.

Trump did not put forward the proposal during at Friday speech before conservative activists, and he did not bring it up Monday at a bipartisan meeting with governors at the White House, where gun violence was the top talker during a televised session.

Sources familiar with the White House’s discussions with leadership on Capitol Hill told CNN later that Trump was seemingly moving away from his position.

A senior congressional aide told DailyMail.com that discussions about the president’s proposals, like allowing teachers to pack heat, were still in their early stages, with Congress having been out of session last week and only just returning on Monday to Washington.

Furthermore, the House will be out from today on as the late evangelical pastor Billy Graham lies in honor in the U.S. Capitol.

The source said that the basic posture of the House is to see what can pass in the GOP-controlled Senate, which is focused this week on nominations.

House Republicans have already passed legislation to strengthen the existing background check system that it paired with a concealed carry provision. The Senate version of the background check bill has lingered in the Senate.

Trump informed GOP Rep. Steve Scalise, the Republican Party’s top vote counter in the House, on Wednesday that the measure permitting concealed carry reciprocity between states would have to be cut from the bill now in order to get the base background check bill through the more liberal Senate.

‘Let it be a separate bill,’ he warned the GOP leader. ‘If you add concealed carry to this, you’ll never get it passed.’

Trump has said he favors comprehensive legislation, but the White House had refused to take a position on universal background checks prior to Trump’s assertion on Wednesday that he supports them.

‘We’d have to see what it looks like and review that before we make that determination,’ press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday.

Sanders was equally non-committal on Tuesday in her daily briefing when questioned about the president’s support for the bill put together by Manchin and Toomey.

‘The President, as I’ve said, expects to meet with a number of lawmakers tomorrow from both sides of the aisle, and we’ll have some more information about specifics after that,’ she asserted.

The Trump spokeswoman insisted Tuesday, as she did Monday, that the president remains supportive of the proposition to make sales of the AR-15 and other automatic rifles 21 and over, despite the National Rifle Association’s adamant opposition to the measure.

‘He knows that everybody doesn’t necessarily agree,’ Sanders explained. ‘We’re not going to get into the details on the specifics of what we will propose.’

On Monday, Sanders said that Trump had not ‘downgraded’ his proposal.

‘The president is still supportive of the concept,’ she said, as a weekend meeting with the National Rifle Association that was kept off Trump’s public schedule came to light.

The NRA does not support new age restrictions on firearms sales and its spokeswoman suggested Sunday that Trump was not firmly committed to his position.

‘These are just things that he’s discussing right now,’ spokesman Dana Loesch said during an appearance on ABC News.

Sanders told reporters on Monday that it ‘would be ridiculous’ to intimate that Trump had been influenced by the powerful gun group that opposes the restrictions ‘considering the number of individuals he’s met with that come from both the far left to the far right, and a lot of those in between.’

She said Trump plans to continue his talks with a lawmakers this week in meetings at the White House and would ultimately base his decision on what is outlined in legislative text.

‘In concept, the President still supports it, but in terms of legislation, we’d need to see what that looks like before we weigh in further,’ Sanders said.

White House communications director Hope Hicks to resign

Hope Hicks To Resign As President Trump’s White House Communications Director | TIME

Why is Hope Hicks, Trump’s longest-serving aide, resigning?

White House Communications Director Hope Hicks made the surprising announcement on Wednesday that she will leave the Trump administration in the coming weeks. The news comes a day after Hicks testifies for hours before the House Intelligence Committee as part of the Russia probe. Judy Woodruff learns more from Ashley Parker of The Washington Post.

Why did Hope Hicks resign? Even the good option looks bad.

Officials announced on Feb. 28 that Hope Hicks will resign. She had been White House communications director since Sept. 2017.(The Washington Post)

White House Communications Director Hope Hicks is resigning less than six months after officially taking that job on a permanent basis. And according to a timeline provided by the reporter who broke the story, the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, Hicks spent a substantial portion of her tenure — perhaps as much as half of it — considering leaving.

Hope Hicks departure is NOT about yesterday’s hearing, per multiple sources. She had planned it before, had been thinking about it for months. She had informed a very small number of people prior to Hill hearing that she planned to leave.

It was tempting to draw a line — as Iand others speculated about — between Hicks’s exit and two controversies: Her involvement in the Rob Porter scandal as both communications director and his girlfriend, and her House Intelligence Committee testimony Tuesday in which she admitted to telling white lies for Trump. If nothing else, the timing is suspicious for a resignation to come so close in proximity to each of those two things.

But consider the alternative. The alternative is that someone who has been in the White House for 13 months started thinking about leaving well shy of a year on the staff — and shortly after rising to one of the top jobs. The point: Regardless of which one it was, it doesn’t portend good things or stability in the White House moving forward.

It’s no secret the White House has become something of a revolving door for staff. Hicks was the fifth person designated as communications director and the third to hold the job on a non-interim basis. Trump has also already parted ways with a press secretary, a national security adviser, a chief strategist, a chief of staff (with his second, John Kelly, apparently on thin ice) and plenty of others.

Hicks was supposed to be different. Perhaps his longest-serving aide — dating back to before the campaign — she was someone who understood Trump and seemed to command his implicit trust. The White House would be a stressful job for anyone, but Hicks at least benefited from the kind of strong working relationship with Trump that other figures — especially those from the GOP establishment — clearly did not have.

She was not as familiar with politics as others, but in a White House in which conflictswith the boss are often the cause for early departures, Hicks made sense as a potential long-termer. Like Reince Priebus, Stephen K. Bannon, Sean Spicer and the rest, though, she has now proven a short-timer. Even fellow Trump loyalists like Keith Schiller have found the White House to be tough long-term employment.

Whether it’s because of exhaustion in dealing with Trump or the exhaustion in dealing with Washington politics for outsiders like Hicks, or a combination, it seems Trump will have a difficult time maintaining anything resembling a core staff organization. And for a president who has struggled with consistency and is thought to be heavily reliant upon the last person he has spoken to, that’s likely to lead to even more volatility.

We may yet learn more about Hicks’s departure in the days to come. Nothing about it, though, suggests stability is over the horizon for the White House. If anything was stability for Trump, it was Hicks.

Turnover, investigations have Trump administration adrift

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rattled by two weeks of muddled messages, departures and spitting matches between the president and his own top officials, Donald Trump is facing a shrinking circle of trusted advisers and a staff that’s grim about any prospect of a reset.

Even by the standards of Trump’s often chaotic administration, the announcement of Hope Hicks’ imminent exit spread new levels of anxiety across the West Wing and cracked open disputes that had been building since the White House’s botched handling of domestic violence allegations against a senior aide late last month.

One of Trump’s most loyal and longest-serving aides, Hicks often served as human buffer between the unpredictable president and the business of government. One official on Thursday compared the instability caused by her departure to that of a chief of staff leaving the administration — though that prospect, too, remained a possibility given the questions that have arisen about John Kelly’s competence.

Hicks’ departure comes as special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation appears to be circling the Oval Office, with prosecutors questioning Trump associates about both his business dealings before he became president and his actions in office, according to people with knowledge of the interviews. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has also been weakened after being stripped of his high-level security clearance amid revelations about potential conflicts of interest.

Communications Director Hope Hicks, one of President Trump’s most trusted aides, abruptly announced her resignation Wednesday. Julie Pace says Hicks is under the political magnifying glass, which might have affected her decision. (Feb. 28)

The biggest unknown is how the mercurial Trump will respond to Hicks’ departure and Kushner’s more limited access, according to some of the 16 White House officials, congressional aides and outside advisers interviewed by The Associated Press, most of whom insisted on anonymity in order to disclose private conversations and meetings. Besides Kushner and his wife, presidential daughter Ivanka Trump, most remaining White House staffers were not part of Trump’s close-knit 2016 campaign. One person who speaks to Trump regularly said the president has become increasingly wistful about the camaraderie of that campaign.

Rarely has a modern president confronted so many crises and controversies across so many fronts at the same time. After 13 months in office, there’s little expectation among many White House aides and outside allies that Trump can quickly find his footing or attract new, top-flight talent to the West Wing. And some Republican lawmakers, who are eying a difficult political landscape in November’s midterm elections, have begun to let private frustrations ooze out in public.

“There is no standard operating practice with this administration,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota. “Every day is a new adventure for us.”

Thune’s comments described the White House’s peculiar rollout Thursday of controversial new aluminum and steel tariffs. White House aides spent Wednesday night and Thursday morning scrambling to steer the president away from an announcement on an unfinished policy, with even Kelly in the dark about Trump’s plans. Aides believed they had succeeded in getting Trump to back down and hoped to keep television cameras away from an event with industry executives so the president couldn’t make a surprise announcement. But Trump summoned reporters into the Cabinet Room anyway and declared that the U.S. would levy penalties of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum imports.

Some of Trump’s populist supporters cheered the move. The stock market, which Trump looks to for validation for his economic policies, plunged.

Some officials are bracing for more departures. On Thursday, NBC News reported that the White House was preparing to replace national security adviser H.R. McMaster as early as next month.

As for talk of a White House in upheaval, Sanders pointed out the tax cuts passed late last year: “If they want to call it chaos, fine, but we call it success and productivity and we’re going to keep plugging along.”

For those remaining on the job, the turbulence has been relentless. Just two weeks ago, Kelly, the general brought in to bring order, was himself on the ropes for his handling of the domestic violence allegations against a close aide, Rob Porter. Trump was said to be deeply irritated by the negative press coverage of Kelly’s leadership during the controversy and considering firing him. But first, the president planned to give his chief of staff a chance to defend himself before reporters in the briefing room and gauge the reaction, according to two people with knowledge of the episode. The briefing, however, was canceled after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Kelly’s standing has stabilized somewhat as media attention to the Porter issue has waned.

Graphic shows key departures from Trump administration.

One Kelly backer said the chief of staff’s standing remains tenuous, in part because of his clashes with Kushner over policy, personnel and White House structure. The tensions were exacerbated by Kelly’s decision to downgrade Kushner’s security clearance because the senior adviser had not been permanently approved for the highest level of access.

Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who also serves as a senior White House adviser, have been frustrated by Kelly’s attempt to restrict their access to the president, and they perceive his new crackdown on clearances as a direct shot at them, according to White House aides and outside advisers. Kelly, in turn, has grown frustrated with what he views as the couple’s freelancing. He blames them for changing Trump’s mind at the last minute and questions what exactly they do all day, according to one White House official and an outside ally.

The ethics questions dogging Kushner relate to both his personal financial interests and his dealings in office with foreign officials. Intelligence officials expressed concern that Kushner’s business dealings were a topic of discussion in conversations he was having with foreign officials about foreign policy issues of interest to the U.S. government, a former intelligence official said. Separately, The New York Times reported that two companies made loans worth more than half a billion dollars to Kushner’s family real estate firm after executives met with Kushner at the White House.

Allies of Kushner and Ivanka Trump insist they have no plans to leave the White House in the near future. As for Kelly, he appeared to hint at his tough spot during an event Thursday at the Department of Homeland Security, where he served as secretary before departing for the White House.

“The last thing I wanted to do was walk away from one of the great honors of my life, being the secretary of homeland security,” he said at the agency’s 15th anniversary celebration in Washington. “But I did something wrong and God punished me, I guess.”

Sessions’s remarks follow allegations from President Trump last year that Obama administration officials misused their FISA authority to wrongly surveil members of his transition team.

It is not clear if Sessions has opened a formal investigation into the matter, but he said the Justice Department’s inspector general would take it up.

Sessions similarly said on Fox News on Sunday that his department would look into the process for obtaining warrants under FISA.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at a press briefing on Tuesday it is the Justice Department’s responsibility to investigate claims of FISA abuses and that the White House would support the probe.

“I think that’s the role of the Department of Justice, and we’re glad that they’re fulfilling that job,” she said.

Trump has publicly pressed Sessions to open up an investigation into potential abuses of the program, which allows U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to obtain secret surveillance orders on individuals in the U.S. suspected of being foreign terrorists or spies.

The president claimed last year that the Obama administration improperly wiretapped members of his presidential campaign and transition team, though the White House has not provided any evidence to support that claim.

Allegations of FISA abuses surfaced again last month, when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a controversial memo alleging that FBI and Justice Department officials misused their authority to obtain a surveillance order on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

The committee released a Democrat-authored memo on Saturday countering the claims in the GOP document.

“We believe the Department of Justice must adhere to the high standards in the FISA court and, yes, it will be investigated. And I think that’s just the appropriate thing,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Tuesday that the Justice Department’s inspector general is looking into a House Republican memo’s claim that prosecutors and FBI agents misled a federal judge when applying for warrants to surveil a Trump campaign adviser with ties to Moscow.

In response to a question at a press conference about government anti-opioid efforts, Sessions appeared to confirm that the Justice Department is investigating the surveillance-related allegations leveled in the memo issued by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and declassified on Feb. 2 at the order of President Donald Trump.

“We believe the Department of Justice must adhere to the high standards in the FISA court and, yes, it will be investigated. And I think that’s just the appropriate thing,” Sessions said, referring to the secret court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “The inspector general will take that as one of the matters they’ll deal with,” he added.

The GOP memo charged that federal officials did not fully disclose important facts in an October 2016 FISA warrant application to monitor the communications of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, including that Democrats had funded a private intelligence dossier which was part of the basis for the request.

A Democratic rebuttal memo released Saturday said that the application did in fact disclose that the dossier had been commissioned by Trump’s political rivals, and noted that federal judges renewed the warrant on Page three times after its initial approval. Democrats call the GOP memo an effort to raise misleading doubts about the Russia investigation’s integrity.

A spokeswoman for Sessions said his comments were accurate, but referred further questions to aides in the office of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. An IG spokesman said: “We’ve received the referral and decline to comment further.”

Horowitz announced in January 2017 that he was opening a review into numerous sensitive issues, including whether political considerations affected the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. The IG also indicated he planned to examine whether some FBI or Justice Department officials engaged in improper communications with Clinton’s campaign or should have recused themselves.

Horowitz’s announcement of the probe did not indicate any plans to examine issues related to surveillance applications, such as Trump’s claims that his campaign aides were subjected to politically-motivated surveillance before and after the 2016 election.

Over the past year, both Democrats and Republicans have asked Horowitz to expand his inquiry to sweep in various other matters. Before Sessions’ comments Tuesday, there was no explicit indication he had done so. Indeed, Horowitz’s spokespeople have rebuffed media questions about the scope of the review. His answers to lawmakers have also been non-committal.

Horowitz did say in House testimony last November that he expected the election-related review to be completed by March or April of this year.

Trump appears to push for DOJ probe into Hillary Clinton scandals

President Trump took to Twitter Tuesday to promote calls for the Justice Department to investigate alleged criminal activity by his former Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton — citing a Fox News analyst who suggested that the DOJ may be sitting on a “treasure trove” of evidence.

Trump quoted Fox News’ Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano, who suggested on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” that someone at the department may have evidence of criminality from Clinton or her camp that should be investigated.

“He’s got a very good point. Somebody in the Justice Department has a treasure trove of evidence of Mrs. Clinton’s criminality at her own hands, or through others, that ought to be investigated. I fully agree with the President on that.” @judgenapolitano on @marthamaccallum Show

Napolitano was, in turn, reacting to an interview Trump gave to Fox’s “Justice with Judge Jeanine” on Saturday night when he suggested that someone should look into the Clinton campaign’s “fraudulent actions” during the 2016 presidential run in relation to the funding of a controversial anti-Trump dossier that was used by the FBI and DOJ to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

In the wake of his election, Trump backed down on his campaign call to have the DOJ investigate Clinton, but he has returned to the “lock her up” theme since then — and has repeatedly criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not investigating Clinton more aggressively.

In his tweets Tuesday, Trump also branded FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe a witch hunt, quoting experts who appeared on “Fox & Friends” to support his long-standing argument that the probe is baseless and that there was no collusion between members of his team and Russian-linked individuals in the 2016 election.

Ken Starr, the independent counsel tasked with investigating Clinton administration controversies in the 1990s, said on Sunday that there has been “no evidence of collusion” so far from the Mueller team, prompting a tweet from the president’s account.

“We’ve seen NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION….I have seen nothing, the firing of James Comey and all of the aftermath, that suggests that the President has obstructed justice because he’s exercising his power as the President of the U.S. I just don’t see it.” Judge Ken Starr

“I’ve been skeptical about the collusion and obstruction claims for the last year. I just don’t see the evidence….in terms of the collusion, it’s all a bit implausible based on the evidence we have.” Jonathan Turley on @FoxNews

The Impeach-O-Meter is a wildly subjective and speculative daily estimate of the likelihood that Donald Trump leaves office before his term ends, whether by being impeached (and convicted) or by resigning under threat of same.

Republicans have been quite successful of late in elections and control both chambers of Congress and the White House. On Tuesday, given a chance to present a unified response to minority Democrats’ pointed questioning of attorney general Jeff Sessions at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, America’s powerful governing party … squabbled with itself about whether it’s necessary to launch another investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server.

The background here is that a number of Republican legislators believe Crooked Hillary’s vast past crookedness warrants the appointment of another special counsel. Among them are Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, and Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, who sit on the Judiciary Committee. Their beef with Clinton involves the server but, as this as this graphic demonstrates, also extends to most of the rest of the events that have ever taken place in the universe:

(Please note that the State Department is presented on this chart as a subsidiary of “Benghazi” and that there is a line between the box on the lower right labeled “Obama” and another box toward the middle which is also labeled “Obama.” What do the binary Obamas have to hide?)

In reality world, however, Comey is considered a credible figure by nonpartisan observers and the general public. He’s a respected federal law-enforcement lifer who moreoever was himself a registered Republican until very recently. Jeff Sessions, whose job involves maintaining good relations with the federal law-enforcement community and who has tangible (if highly controversial) non-Hillary priorities of his own, does not appear to have an appetite for picking a fight with a former FBI director or spending resources on a special-counsel goose chase. At Tuesday’s hearing, his feelings on the matter broke into the open as he demonstrated spectacularly little patience for Jordan’s rambling Comey/Clinton questions:

Rep. Jordan: We know that Mr. Comey publicized the [email server] investigation and we know he made the final decision on whether to prosecute or not. And then when he gets fired, he leaks a government document through a friend to the New York Times—and what was his goal? To create momentum for special counsel. It can’t be just any special counsel, it’s Bob Mueller, his mentor. The same Bob Mueller who now is in this investigation with Russian businesses wanting to do business here in the United States. So I guess my main question is, what’s it going to take to actually get a special counsel? What’s it going to take to actually get a special counsel?

Jeff Sessions: It would take a factual basis that meets a standards of the appointment of a special counsel.

Ya burnt, Jim Jordan. Jordan didn’t give up, though:

Jordan: It sure looks like the FBI was paying the author of [the Steele dossier] and it sure looks like a major political party was working with the federal government to then turn an opposition research document, the equivalent of a National Enquirer story, into an intelligence document, take that to the FISA court so they can then get a warrant to spy on the campaign. That’s what it looks like.

Replied Sessions: “‘Looks like’ is not enough basis to appoint a special counsel.” Cold!

Making the whole situation even more bizarre: Jordan and the other legislators pursuing this line of inquiry are just following the lead of Sessions’ boss, who is still mad at his own A.G. for allowing the Russia investigation to go forward and has been taking it out on him for months by whining in public.

Thus do we have Republican legislators carrying water for a Republican president who’s ticked off that his Republican attorney general won’t relitigate a decision that was made by a Republican FBI director. Unified government, indeed.

Today’s meter level is unchanged because 60 percent is already quite high, but it’s a confident 60 percent. Do the people described above seem to you like they’re capable of running the government until 2020 without a self-inflicted catastrophic collapse?

The FBI’s Fake « Investigation » of Hillary Clinton’s Emails

On September 17th, U.S. President Barack Obama, the boss of the U.S. Government’s Executive Branch — including of federal investigations and prosecutions (including of FBI decisons not to investigate, and not to prosecute) — said that, in this Presidential election,

This statement by him provides useful background context behind the following news-report (and readers are urged to click onto the link at any point here wherever a given allegation’s veracity is at all in doubt, to see the extensive documentation for it):

The FBI’s ‘investigation’ into Hillary Clinton’s State Department email operation was fake in three major ways:

« the prosecutor has all the power. The Supreme Court’s suggestion that a plea bargain is a fair and voluntary contractual arrangement between two relatively equal parties is a total myth. … What really puts the prosecutor in the driver’s seat is the fact that he — because of mandatory minimums, sentencing guidelines (which, though no longer mandatory in the federal system, are still widely followed by most judges), and simply his ability to shape whatever charges are brought — can effectively dictate the sentence by how he publicly describes the offense.”

If an Administration wants to be merely pretending an ‘investigation’, it’s easy: identify, as the topic for the alleged ‘investigation’, not the criminal laws that indisputably describe what the suspect can clearly be proven to have done, but instead criminal laws that don’t. Prosecutorial discretion is now practically unlimited in the United States. This discretion is an essential feature of any dictatorship. It’s the essence of any system that separates people into aristocrats, who are above the law, versus the public, upon whom their ‘law’ is enforced. It’s the essence of “a nation of men, not of laws.”

But they already had seen this email. So, they asked her about that specific one:

« Clinton stated she did not remember the email specifically. Clinton stated a ‘nonpaper’ was a document with no official heading, or identifying marks of any kind, that can not be attributed to the US Government. Clinton thought a ‘nonpaper’ was a way to convey the unofficial stance of the US Government to a foreign government and believed this practice went back ‘200 years.’ When viewing the displayed email, Clinton believed she was asking Sullivan to remove the State letterhead and provide unclassified talking points. Clinton stated she had no intention to remove classification markings.”

Look at the email: is her statement about it — that « issues sending secure fax” had nothing to do with the illegality of sending classified U.S. Government information over a non-secured, even privatized, system — even credible? Is the implication by Clinton’s remark, that changing the letterhead and removing the document’s classified stamp, would solve the problem that Jake Sullivan — a highly skilled attorney himself — had brought to her attention, even credible?

Well, if so, then wouldn’t the FBI have asked Sullivan what he was referring to when his email to Clinton said « They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it.”

The FBI provided no indication that there was any such follow-up, at all. They could have plea-bargained with Sullivan, to get him to testify first, so that his testimony could be used in questioning of her, but they seem not to have been interested in doing any such thing. They believed what she said (even though it made no sense as a response to the problem that Sullivan had just brought to her attention: the problem that emailing to her this information would violate several federal criminal statutes. Clinton, in other words, didn’t really care about the legality. And, apparently, neither did the FBI. Her email in response to Sullivan’s said simply: « If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” So: she knew that it was classified information but wanted to receive it so that she would be able to say, “I didn’t know that it was classified information.” In other words: she was instructing her advisor: hide the fact that it’s classified information, so that when I receive it, there will be no indication on it that what was sent to me is classified information.

3: The FBI avoided using the standard means to investigate a suspect higher-up: obtaining plea-deals with subordinates, requiring them to cooperate, answer questions and not to plead the Fifth Amendment (not to refuse to answer). (In Hillary’s case, the Obama Administration actually did plea-deals in which they allowed the person who was supposed to answer all questions, to plea the Fifth Amendment to all questions instead. This is allowed only when the government doesn’t want to prosecute the higher-up — which in this case was Clinton. That alone proves the Obama Administration’s ‘investigation’ of Clinton’s email system to have been a farce.)

A plea-deal isn’t a Constitutional process: Jed Rakoff’s article explained why it’s not. The process is informal, but nowadays it’s used in more than 97% of cases in which charges are brought, and in more than 99% of all cases (including the 92% of cases that are simply dropped without any charges being brought). That’s the main reason why nowadays «the prosecutor has all the power». Well, the prosecutor in Hillary’s case (the Obama Administration) clearly didn’t want her in the big house; they wanted her in the White House.

Whoever, for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation, goes upon, enters, flies over, or otherwise obtains information concerning any vessel, aircraft, work of defense, navy yard, naval station, submarine base, fueling station, fort, battery, torpedo station, dockyard, canal, railroad, arsenal, camp, factory, mine, telegraph, telephone, wireless, or signal station, building, office, research laboratory or station or other place connected with the national defense owned or constructed, or in progress of construction by the United States or under the control of the United States, or of any of its officers, departments, or agencies, or within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States, or any place in which any vessel, aircraft, arms, munitions, or other materials or instruments for use in time of war are being made, prepared, repaired, stored, or are the subject of research or development, under any contract or agreement with the United States, or any department or agency thereof, or with any person on behalf of the United States, or otherwise on behalf of the United States, or any prohibited place so designated by the President by proclamation in time of war or in case of national emergency in which anything for the use of the Army, Navy, or Air Force is being prepared or constructed or stored, information as to which prohibited place the President has determined would be prejudicial to the national defense; or

(b)

Whoever, for the purpose aforesaid, and with like intent or reason to believe, copies, takes, makes, or obtains, or attempts to copy, take, make, or obtain, any sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, document, writing, or note of anything connected with the national defense; or

(c)

Whoever, for the purpose aforesaid, receives or obtains or agrees or attempts to receive or obtain from any person, or from any source whatever, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note, of anything connected with the national defense, knowing or having reason to believe, at the time he receives or obtains, or agrees or attempts to receive or obtain it, that it has been or will be obtained, taken, made, or disposed of by any person contrary to the provisions of this chapter; or

(d)

Whoever, lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it; or

(e)

Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it; or

(f)

Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

(g)

If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions of this section, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy.

(h)

(1)

Any person convicted of a violation of this section shall forfeit to the United States, irrespective of any provision of State law, any property constituting, or derived from, any proceeds the person obtained, directly or indirectly, from any foreign government, or any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, as the result of such violation. For the purposes of this subsection, the term “State” includes a State of the United States, the District of Columbia, and any commonwealth, territory, or possession of the United States.

(2)

The court, in imposing sentence on a defendant for a conviction of a violation of this section, shall order that the defendant forfeit to the United States all property described in paragraph (1) of this subsection.

(3)The provisions of subsections (b), (c), and (e) through (p) of section 413 of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 (21 U.S.C. 853(b), (c), and (e)–(p)) shall apply to—

(A)

property subject to forfeiture under this subsection;

(B)

any seizure or disposition of such property; and

(C)

any administrative or judicial proceeding in relation to such property,

if not inconsistent with this subsection.

(4)

Notwithstanding section 524(c) of title 28, there shall be deposited in the Crime Victims Fund in the Treasury all amounts from the forfeiture of property under this subsection remaining after the payment of expenses for forfeiture and sale authorized by law.

Sara Carter: Fusion GPS testimony backfired on the Democrats

Read: the full text of the Nunes memo

The House Intelligence Committee just released the “Nunes memo” — and it contains some explosive allegations about the FBI.

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted on Monday night to release the four-page memo, authored by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), which alleges that the FBI abused its power in surveilling Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. The vote gave the president five days to review the classified document and decide whether it should be released for the public.

Despite objections from the FBI and Democrats, Trump authorized the release of the memo on Friday. Minutes later, the House Intelligence Committee released it to the public.

The memo makes several claims that could potentially threaten special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation.

Here are the memo’s key claims:

The FBI used an unverified, allegedly biased document known as the “Steele dossier”to get a warrant in October 2016 to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser. The dossier, prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele, alleges the existence of a conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russian government. The Steele dossier was partially financed by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — which the memo argues is a major problem.

SeniorFBI and Justice Department officials knew that the Steele dossier was indirectly funded by a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and the DNC, but didn’t disclose this in their application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court — a court that approves surveillance warrants pertaining to national security and foreign intelligence. They also didn’t disclose it when renewing their applications requesting additional time for surveillance.

In September 2016, Steele spoke with Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr. Steele told Ohr that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” Ohr’s wife worked for the research firm, Fusion GPS, that hired Steele on behalf of the DNC/Clinton lawyer.

The head of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division Bill Priestap apparently said corroboration of the Steele dossier was in its “infancy” at the time of the FISA application.

And here’s the text of the memo reprinted in full below:

THE WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON

February 2, 2018

The Honorable Devin Nunes

Chairman, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

United States Capitol

Washington, DC 20515

Dear Mr. Chairman:

On January 29, 2018, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (herein after “the Committee”) voted to disclose publicly a memorandum containing classified information provided to the Committee in connection with its oversight activities (the “Memorandum,” which is attached to this letter). As provided by clause 11(g) of Rule of the House of Representatives, the Committee has forwarded this Memorandum to the President based on its determination that the release of the Memorandum would serve the public interest.

The Constitution vests the President with the authority to protect national security secrets from disclosure. As the Supreme Court has recognized, it is the President’s responsibility to classify, declassify, and control access to information bearing on our intelligence sources and methods and national defense. See, e.g., Dep of Navy v. Egan, 484 US. 518, 527 (1988). In order to facilitate appropriate congressional oversight, the Executive Branch may entrust classified information to the appropriate committees of Congress, as it has done in connection with the Committee’s oversight activities here. The Executive Branch does so on the assumption that the Committee will responsibly protect such classified information, consistent with the laws of the United States.

The Committee has now determined that the release of the Memorandum would be appropriate. The Executive Branch, across Administrations of both parties, has worked to accommodate congressional requests to declassify specific materials in the public interest.(1) However, public release of classified information by unilateral action of the Legislative Branch is extremely rare and raises significant separation of powers concerns. Accordingly, the Committee’s request to release the Memorandum is interpreted as a request for declassification pursuant to the President’s authority.

The President understands that the protection of our national security represents his highest obligation. Accordingly, he has directed lawyers and national security staff to assess the declassification request, consistent with established standards governing the handling of classified information, including those under Section 3.1(d) of Executive Order 13526. Those standards permit declassification when the public interest in disclosure outweighs any need to protect the information. The White House review process also included input from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice. Consistent with this review and these standards, the President has determined that declassification of the Memorandum is appropriate.

Based on this assessment and in light of the significant public interest in the memorandum, the President has authorized the declassification of the Memorandum. To be clear, the Memorandum rejects the judgments of its congressional authors. The President understands that oversight concerning matters related to the Memorandum may be continuing. Though the circumstances leading to the declassification through this process are extraordinary, the Executive Branch stands ready to work with Congress to accommodate oversight requests consistent with applicable standards and processes, including the need to protect intelligence sources and methods.

Sincerely,

[signature]

Donald F. McGahn II

Counsel to the President

cc: The Honorable Paul Ryan

Speaker of the House of Representatives

The Honorable Adam Schiff

Ranking Member, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

[Footnote]

(1) See, e.g., S. Rept. 114-8 at 12 (Administration of Barack Obama) (“On April 3, 2014 … the Committee agreed to send the revised Findings and Conclusions, and the updated Executive Summary of the Committee Study, to the President for declassification and public release.”); H. Rept. 107-792 (Administration of George W. Bush) (similar); E.O. 12812 (Administration of George H.W. Bush) (nothing Senate resolution requesting that President provide for declassification of certain information via Executive Order).

Declassified by order of the President

February 2, 2018

January 18, 2018

To: HPSCI Majority Members

From: HPSCI Majority Staff

Subject: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Purpose

This memorandum provides Members an update on significant facts relating to theCommittee’s ongoing investigation into the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and their use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Our findings, which are detailed below, 1) raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign IntelligenceSurveillance Court (FISC), and 2) represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.

Investigation Update

On October 21, 2016, DOJ and FBI sought and received a FISA probable cause order (up; under Title VII) authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. Page is aUS citizen who served as a volunteer advisor to the Trump presidential campaign. Consistent with requirements under FISA, the application had to be first certified by the Director or Deputy Director of the FBI. It then required the approval of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General (DAG), or the Senate confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division. The FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals from the FISC. As required by statute (50 U.S.C. 1805 (d)(1)) a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the FISC every 90 days and each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications. in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ.

Due to the sensitive nature of foreign intelligence activity, FISA submissions (including renewals) before the FISC are classified. As such, the public’s confidence in the integrity of the FISA process depends on the court’s ability to hold the government to the highest standard, particularly as it relates to surveillance of American citizens. However, the rigor in protecting the rights of Americans, which is reinforced by 90-day renewals of surveillance orders, is necessarily dependent on the government’s production to the court of all material and relevant facts. This should include information potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application that is known by the government. In the case of Carter Page, the government had at least four independent opportunities before the FISC to accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts. However, our findings indicate that, as described below, material and relevant information was omitted.

1) The “dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele (Steele dossier) on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application. Steele was a longtime FBI source who was paid over $160,000 by the DNC and Clinton campaign, via the law firm Perkins Coie and research firm Fusion GPS, to obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

a) Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.

b) The initial FISA application notes Steele was working for a named U.S. person, but does not name Fusion GPS and principal Glenn Simpson, who was paid by a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie) representing the DNC (even though it was known by DOJ at the time that political actors were involved with the Steele dossier). The application does not mention Steele was ultimately working on behalf of—and paid by—the DNC and Clinton campaign, or that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.

2) The Carter Page FISA application also cited extensively a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focuses on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News. The Page FISA application incorrectly assesses that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News. Steele has admitted in British court filings that he met with Yahoo News—and several other outlets—in September 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS. Perkins Coie was aware of Steele’s initial media contacts because they hosted at least one meeting in Washington DC in 2016 with Steele and Fusion GPS where this matter was discussed.

a) Steele was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations—an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jones article by David Corn Steele should have been terminated for his previous undisclosed contacts with Yahoo and other outlets in September—before the Page application was submitted to the FISC in October—but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.

b) Steele’s numerous encounters with the media violated the cardinal rule of source handling—maintaining confidentiality—and demonstrated that Steele had become a less than reliable source for the FBI.

3) Before and after Steele was terminated as a source, he maintained contact with DOJ via then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who worked closely with Deputy Attorneys General Yates and later Rosenstein. Shortly after the election, the FBI began interviewing Ohr, documenting his communications with Steele. For example, in September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not, being president.” This clear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in official FBI files— but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications.

a) During this same time period, Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the FISC.

4) According to the head of the counterintelligence division, Assistant Director Bill Priestap, corroboration of the Steele dossier was in its “infancy” at the time of the initial Page FISA application. After Steele was terminated, a source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated. Yet, in early January 2017, Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on a summary of the Steele dossier, even though it was—according to his June 2017 testimony—“salacious and unverified.” While the FISA application relied on Steele’s past record of credible reporting on other unrelated matters, it ignored or concealed his anti-Trump financial and ideological motivations. Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.

5) The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok. Strzok was reassigned by the Special Counsel’s Office to FBI Human Resources for improper text messages with his mistress, FBI Attorney Lisa Page (no known relation to Carter Page), where they both demonstrated a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, whom Strzok had also investigated. The Strzok/Lisa Page texts also reflect extensive discussions about the investigation, orchestrating leaks to the media, and include a meeting with Deputy Director McCabe to discuss an “insurance” policy against President Trump’s election.

The Full Text of the Nunes Memo

On Friday, the House Intelligence Committee, which is chaired by Republican Representative Devin Nunes, released a four-page memo alleging surveillance abuses by the FBI. Earlier this week, Republicans on the committee voted to make the document public. The classified document has drawn criticism from Democratic lawmakers, who argue it is misleading, as well as from law enforcement officials. In a rare statement, the FBI warned against the document’s release, saying it had “grave concerns” about its accuracy. Despite pushback from officials, the White House approved the release of the memo Friday.Below, read the memo in full.

January 18, 2018

To: HPSCI Majority Members

From: HPSCI Majority Staff

Subject: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Purpose

This memorandum provides Members an update on significant facts relating to the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and their use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Our findings, which are detailed below, 1) raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and 2) represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.

Investigation UpdateOn October 21, 2016, DOJ and FBI sought and received a FISA probable cause order (not under Title VII) authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. Page is a U.S. citizen who served as a volunteer advisor to the Trump presidential campaign. Consistent with requirements under FISA, the application had to be first certified by the Director or Deputy Director of the FBI. It then required the approval of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General (DAG), or the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division.The FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals from the FISC. As required by statute (50 U.S.C. §,1805(d)(l)), a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the FISC every 90 days and each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Then-DAG Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ.Due to the sensitive nature of foreign intelligence activity, FISA submissions (including renewals) before the FISC are classified. As such, the public’s confidence in the integrity of the FISA process depends on the court’s ability to hold the government to the highest standard—particularly as it relates to surveillance of American citizens. However, the FISC’s rigor in protecting the rights of Americans, which is reinforced by 90-day renewals of surveillance orders, is necessarily dependent on the government’s production to the court of all material and relevant facts. This should include information potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application that is known by the government. In the case of Carter Page, the government had at least four independent opportunities before the FISC to accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts. However, our findings indicate that, as described below, material and relevant information was omitted.

1) The “dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele (Steele dossier) on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application. Steele was a longtime FBI source who was paid over $160,000 by the DNC and Clinton campaign, via the law firm Perkins Coie and research firm Fusion GPS, to obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.a) Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.b) The initial FISA application notes Steele was working for a named U.S. person, but does not name Fusion GPS and principal Glenn Simpson, who was paid by a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie) representing the DNC (even though it was known by DOJ at the time that political actors were involved with the Steele dossier). The application does not mention Steele was ultimately working on behalf of—and paid by—the DNC and Clinton campaign, or that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.2) The Carter Page FISA application also cited extensively a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focuses on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News. The Page FISA application incorrectly assesses that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News. Steele has admitted in British court filings that he met with Yahoo News—and several other outlets—in September 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS. Perkins Coie was aware of Steele’s initial media contacts because they hosted at least one meeting in Washington D.C. in 2016 with Steele and Fusion GPS where this matter was discussed.

a) Steele was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations—an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jones article by David Corn. Steele should have been terminated for his previous undisclosed contacts with Yahoo and other outlets in September—before the Page application was submitted to the FISC in October—but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.b) Steele’s numerous encounters with the media violated the cardinal rule of source handling—maintaining confidentiality—and demonstrated that Steele had become a less than reliable source for the FBI.3) Before and after Steele was terminated as a source, he maintained contact with DOJ via then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who worked closely with Deputy Attorneys General Yates and later Rosenstein. Shortly after the election, the FBI began interviewing Ohr, documenting his communications with Steele. For example, in September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” This clear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in official FBI files—but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications.

a) During this same time period, Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the FISC.4) According to the head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, Assistant Director Bill Priestap, corroboration of the Steele dossier was in its “infancy” at the time of the initial Page FISA application. After Steele was terminated, a source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated. Yet, in early January 2017, Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on a summary of the Steele dossier, even though it was—according to his June 2017 testimony—“salacious and unverified.” While the FISA application relied on Steele’s past record of credible reporting on other unrelated matters, it ignored or concealed his anti-Trump financial and ideological motivations. Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.5) The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok. Strzok was reassigned by the Special Counsel’s Office to FBI Human Resources for improper text messages with his mistress, FBI Attorney Lisa Page (no known relation to Carter Page), where they both demonstrated a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, whom Strzok had also investigated. The Strzok/Lisa Page texts also reflect extensive discussions about the investigation, orchestrating leaks to the media, and include a meeting with Deputy Director McCabe to discuss an “insurance” policy against President Trump’s election.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/read-the-full-text-of-the-nunes-memo/552191/

Some of the dossier’s allegations have been confirmed, while others have yet to be proved or disproved.[8][9] Some claims may require access to classified information for verification.[10] The media, intelligence community, as well as most experts have treated the dossier with caution, while Trump himself denounced the report as “fake news“. In February 2017, some details related to conversations between foreign nationals were independently verified.[11] As of December 2017, the dossier’s allegations of collusion have not been corroborated.[12][13]

The dossier was produced as part of opposition research during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. After Trump emerged as the probable Republican nominee, attorney Marc Elias of the Perkins Coie law firm retained American research firm Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research about Trump on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton presidential campaign. Fusion GPS later contracted Steele to compile the dossier.[14] Following Trump’s election as president, Steele continued working on the report, with funding from Democrats ceasing and financing finally coming directly from Glenn R. Simpson of Fusion GPS.[15] The completed dossier and its information was then passed on to British and American intelligence services.[16]

Allegations

The dossier contains multiple allegations, some of which are currently unverified and others for which possible verification is classified.[10] Natasha Bertrand has stated that it “alleges serious misconduct and conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia’s government”, and that, quoting the dossier, the “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership was managed on the Trump side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort.”[17]

Trump has repeatedly denied the allegations, labeling the dossier as “discredited”, “debunked”, “fictitious”, and “fake news”.[18]

History

The dossier and the investigations preceding it were part of opposition research on Trump. The investigation into Trump was initially funded by a conservative political website before Steele was involved, and later was funded by Democrats.[19][20][2][21]

In October 2015, during the Republican primary campaign, The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website primarily funded by Republican donor Paul Singer, hired the American research firm Fusion GPS to conduct general opposition research on Trump and other Republican presidential candidates.[1] For months, Fusion GPS gathered information about Trump, focusing on his business and entertainment activities. When Trump became the presumptive nominee on May 3, 2016, The Free Beacon stopped funding research on him.[2][22][23]

In April 2016, Marc Elias, a partner in the large Seattle-based law firm Perkins Coie and head of its Political Law practice, hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Trump. Elias was the attorney of record for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton presidential campaign.[14] As part of their investigation, Fusion GPS hired Orbis Business Intelligence, a private British intelligence firm, to look into connections between Trump and Russia. Orbis co-founder Christopher Steele, a retired British MI6 officer with expertise in Russian matters,[2] was hired in May or June to do the job.[24]

According to Fusion GPS’s co-owners, Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch, they did not tell Steele who their clients were and “gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: ‘Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?'”[25] In total, Perkins Coie paid Fusion GPS $1.02 million in fees and expenses, $168,000 of which was paid to Orbis and used by them to produce the dossier.[26] Simpson has stated that Steele did not pay any of his sources.[27][25][unreliable source?]

According to Steele, he soon found “troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. He said that, according to his sources, “there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit.” He described the finding as “an extraordinary situation” and concluded it was “sufficiently serious” for him to share it with the FBI, which he did in July 2016.[28]

Steele delivered his report as a series of two- or three-page memos, starting in June 2016 and continuing through December. He continued his investigation even after the Democratic client stopped paying for it following Trump’s election.[2] After the election, Fusion GPS co-owner Simpson “reportedly spent his own money to continue the investigation”.[15]

On his own initiative, Steele decided to also pass the information to British and American intelligence services because he believed the findings were a matter of national security for both countries.[29] According to the testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, Steele approached the FBI because he was concerned that the then candidate, Donald Trump, was being blackmailed by Russia.[30] However, he became frustrated with the FBI, which he believed was failing to investigate his reports, choosing instead to focus on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. According to The Independent, Steele came to believe that there was a “cabal” inside the FBI, particularly its New York field office linked to Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani, which blocked any attempts to investigate the links between Trump and Russia.[29] In October 2016, Steele had compiled 33 pages (16 memos) and passed on what he discovered so far to a reporter from Mother Jones magazine.[28]

In a court filing in April 2017, Steele revealed previously unreported information that in December 2016, shortly after the presidential election, he gave a copy of the 16 memos to “the senior British national security official and sent an encrypted version to Fusion GPS with instructions to deliver a hard copy to Senator John McCain (R-AZ).[31] McCain, who had been informed about the alleged links between Kremlin and Trump, met with former British ambassador to Moscow Sir Andrew Wood. Wood confirmed the existence of the dossier and vouched for Steele’s “professionalism and integrity”.[29] McCain obtained the dossier from David J. Kramer and took it directly to FBI director James Comey on December 9, 2016.[2][20] Comey has confirmed that counter-intelligence investigations are under way into possible links between Trump associates and Moscow, and CNN has reported that the FBI used the dossier to bolster its investigations.”[31]

After delivering the 16 memos, more information was received, and two more pages, the “December memo”, dated “13 December 2016”, was prepared. It alleged efforts by Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to pay those who had hacked the DNC and to “cover up all traces of the hacking operation”.[32][31] Trump and Cohen have denied the allegations.[32][31][33] Cohen said that between August 23 and August 29 he was in Los Angeles and in New York for the entire month of September.[34] According to a Czech intelligence source, there is no record of him entering Prague by plane, but Respekt magazine pointed out that it’s theoretically possible he could have entered by car or train from a neighboring country in the Schengen Zone.[35]

Hints of existence

By the third quarter of 2016, many news organizations knew about the existence of the dossier, which had been described as an “open secret” among journalists. However, they chose not to publish information that could not be confirmed.[2] Finally on October 31, 2016, a week before the election, Mother Jones reported that a former intelligence officer, whom they did not name, had produced a report based on Russian sources and turned it over to the FBI.[28] It starts with the allegation that:

The “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance”. It maintained that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals”. It claimed that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and could “blackmail him”.

In October 2016, the FBI reached an agreement with Steele to pay him to continue his work, according to involved sources reported by The Washington Post. “Steele was known for the quality of his past work and for the knowledge he had developed over nearly 20 years working on Russia-related issues for British intelligence.”[36] The FBI found Steele credible and his unproved information worthy enough that it considered paying Steele to continue collecting information, but the release of the document to the public stopped discussions between Steele and the FBI.[36]

President-Elect Trump and President Barack Obama were briefed on the existence of the dossier by the chiefs of several U.S. intelligence agencies in early January 2017. Vice President Joe Biden has confirmed that he and the president had received briefings on the dossier, and the allegations within.[37][22][38][39]

On January 10, 2017, CNN reported that classified documents presented to Obama and Trump the previous week included allegations that Russian operatives possess “compromising personal and financial information” about Trump. CNN stated that it would not publish specific details on the memos because it had not “independently corroborated the specific allegations”.[40][41] Following the CNN report,[42]BuzzFeed published a 35-page dossier that it said was the basis of the briefing, including unverified claims that Russian operatives had collected “embarrassing material” involving Trump that could be used to blackmail him.[43][44][41][45]

Many news organizations knew about the document in the fall of 2016, before the presidential election, but did not publish it because they could not independently verify the information.[46] BuzzFeed was harshly criticized for publishing what Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan called “scurrilous allegations dressed up as an intelligence report meant to damage Donald Trump”,[47] while The New York Times noted that the publication sparked a debate centering on the use of unsubstantiated information from anonymous sources.[48] BuzzFeed’s executive staff said the materials were newsworthy because they were “in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media” and argued that this justified public release.[5]

Authorship

When CNN reported the existence of the dossier on January 10, 2017,[49] it did not name the author of the dossier, but revealed that he was British. Steele concluded that his anonymity had been “fatally compromised” and realized it was “only a matter of time until his name became public knowledge”, and, accompanied by his family, he fled into hiding in fear of “a prompt and potentially dangerous backlash against him from Moscow”.[50][51][19]The Wall Street Journal revealed Steele’s name the next day, on January 11.[52] Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, for whom Steele worked at the time the dossier was authored, and its director Christopher Burrows would not “confirm or deny” that Orbis had produced the dossier.[49][2]

Called by the media a “highly regarded Kremlin expert” and “one of MI6’s greatest Russia specialists”, Steele formerly worked for the British intelligence agency MI6 and is currently working for Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd, a private intelligence company Steele co-founded in London.[53][52][54] Steele entered MI6 in 1987, directly after his graduation from Cambridge University.[55]

Former British ambassador to Moscow Sir Andrew Wood has vouched for Steele’s reputation.[29] He views Steele as a “very competent professional operator … I take the report seriously. I don’t think it’s totally implausible.” He also stated that “the report’s key allegation—that Trump and Russia’s leadership were communicating via secret back channels during the presidential campaign—was eminently plausible”.[56]

On December 26, 2016, Oleg Erovinkin, a former KGB/FSB general, was found dead in his car in Moscow. Erovinkin was a key liaison between Igor Sechin, head of state-owned oil company Rosneft, and President Putin. Steele claimed much of the information came from a source close to Sechin. According to Christo Grozev, a journalist at Risk Management Lab, a think-tank based in Bulgaria, the circumstances of Erovinkin’s death were “mysterious”. Grozev suspected Erovinkin helped Steele compile the dossier on Trump and suggests the hypothesis that the death may have been part of a cover-up by the Russian government.[57][58]Mark Galeotti, senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague, who specializes in Russian history and security, rejected Grozev’s hypothesis.[59][57]In interviews with Luke Harding, “Steele was adamant that Erovinkin wasn’t his source and ‘not one of ours.’ As a person close to Steele put it to me: ‘Sometimes people just die.'”[60]

On March 7, 2017, as some members of the U.S. Congress were expressing interest in meeting with or hearing testimony from Steele, he reemerged after weeks in hiding, appearing publicly on camera and stating, “I’m really pleased to be back here working again at the Orbis’s offices in London today.”[61]

Veracity

Observers and experts have had varying reactions to the dossier. Generally, “former intelligence officers and other national-security experts” urged “skepticism and caution” but still took “the fact that the nation’s top intelligence officials chose to present a summary version of the dossier to both President Obama and President-elect Trump” as an indication “that they may have had a relatively high degree of confidence that at least some of the claims therein were credible, or at least worth investigating further”.[62] The author of the dossier said he believes that 70–90% of the document is accurate.[63] Steele said that his FBI contacts greeted his intelligence report with “shock and horror”.[63] In his June 2017 congressional testimony, former FBI director James Comey called “some personally sensitive aspects” of the dossier “salacious and unverified,” but he did not state that the entire dossier was unverified or that the salacious aspects were false. When Senator Richard Burr asked if any of the allegations in the dossier had been confirmed, Comey said he could not answer that question in a public setting.[64][10]

Vice President Biden told reporters that while he and President Obama were receiving a briefing on the extent of Russian hackers trying to influence the US election, there was a two-page addendum which addressed the contents of the Steele dossier.[65] Top intelligence officials told them they “felt obligated to inform them about uncorroborated allegations about President-elect Donald Trump out of concern the information would become public and catch them off-guard”.[66]

Former Los Angeles Times Moscow correspondent Robert Gillette wrote in an op-ed in the Concord Monitor that the dossier has had at least one of its main factual assertions verified. On January 6, 2017, the Director of National Intelligence released a report assessing “with high confidence” that Russia’s combined cyber and propaganda operation was directed personally by Vladimir Putin, with the aim of harming Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and helping Trump.[67] Gillette wrote: “Steele’s dossier, paraphrasing multiple sources, reported precisely the same conclusion, in greater detail, six months earlier, in a memo dated June 20.”[68]

Newsweek published a list of “13 things that don’t add up” in the dossier, writing that the document was a “strange mix of the amateur and the insightful” and stating that the document “contains lots of Kremlin-related gossip that could indeed be, as the author claims, from deep insiders—or equally gleaned” from Russian newspapers and blogs.[69] Former UK ambassador to Russia Sir Tony Brenton stated that certain aspects of the dossier were inconsistent with British intelligence’s understanding of how the Kremlin works, commenting: “I’ve seen quite a lot of intelligence on Russia, and there are some things in [the dossier] which look pretty shaky.”[70]

According to Business Insider, the dossier alleges that “the Trump campaign agreed to minimize US opposition to Russia’s incursions into Ukraine”.[17] In July 2016, the Republican National Convention made changes to the Republican Party’s platform on Ukraine: initially they proposed providing “lethal weapons” to Ukraine, but the line was changed to “appropriate assistance”. J. D. Gordon, who was one of Trump’s national security advisers during the campaign, said that he had advocated for changing language because that reflected what Trump had said.[17][71]

Reputation in the U.S. intelligence community

According to Paul Wood of BBC News, the information in Steele’s report is also reported by “multiple intelligence sources” and “at least one East European intelligence service”. They report that “compromising material on Mr. Trump” included “more than one tape, not just video, but audio as well, on more than one date, in more than one place, in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.” While also mentioning that “nobody should believe something just because an intelligence agent says it”,[72][52] he added that “the CIA believes it is credible that the Kremlin has such kompromat—or compromising material—on the next US commander in chief” and “a joint taskforce, which includes the CIA and the FBI, has been investigating allegations that the Russians may have sent money to Mr Trump’s organisation or his election campaign”.[73][74][72] On March 30, 2017, Wood reported that the FBI was using the dossier as a roadmap for its investigation.[75] On April 18, 2017, CNN reported that, according to U.S. officials, information from the dossier had been used as part of the basis for getting the FISA warrant to monitor former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page during the summer of 2016. Officials told CNN this information would have had to be independently corroborated by the FBI before being used to obtain the warrant.[16]

Susan Hennessey, a former National Security Agency lawyer now with the Brookings Institution, stated: “My general take is that the intelligence community and law enforcement seem to be taking these claims seriously. That itself is highly significant. But it is not the same as these allegations being verified. Even if this was an intelligence community document—which it isn’t—this kind of raw intelligence is still treated with skepticism.”[62][76] Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes wrote that “the current state of the evidence makes a powerful argument for a serious public inquiry into this matter”.[76]Robert S. Litt, a former lawyer for the Director of National Intelligence, wrote that the dossier “played absolutely no role” in the intelligence community’s determination that Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.[77]

On February 10, 2017, CNN reported that some communications between “senior Russian officials and other Russian individuals” described in the dossier had been corroborated by multiple U.S. officials. They “took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier”. Sources told CNN that some conversations had been “intercepted during routine intelligence gathering”, but refused to reveal the content of conversations, or specify which communications were detailed in the dossier. CNN was unable to confirm whether conversations were related to Trump. U.S. officials said the corroboration gave “US intelligence and law enforcement ‘greater confidence’ in the credibility of some aspects of the dossier as they continue to actively investigate its contents”.[11]

British journalist Julian Borger wrote in October 2017 that “Steele’s reports are being taken seriously after lengthy scrutiny by federal and congressional investigators”, at least Steele’s assessment that Russia had conducted a campaign to interfere in the 2016 election to Clinton’s detriment; that part of the Steele dossier “has generally gained in credibility, rather than lost it”.[78] Liberal commentator Jonathan Chait wrote in December 2017 about the dossier that mainstream media “treat it as gossip” whereas the intelligence community “take it seriously”.[79]

Use in 2017 Special Counsel investigation

According to Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman Mark Warner (D-VA), the dossier’s allegations are being investigated by a Special Counsel led by Robert Mueller, which is also investigating allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.[85] In the summer of 2017, Mueller’s team of investigators met with Christopher Steele.[86] As some leads stemming from the dossier have already been followed and confirmed by the FBI, legal experts have stated that Special Counsel investigators, headed by Robert Mueller, are obligated to follow any leads the dossier has presented them with, irrespective of what parties financed it in its various stages of development, or “[t]hey would be derelict in their duty if they didn’t.”[85][87]

While Trump and some Republicans have claimed that the dossier was behind the beginning of the investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential conspiracy with Russia, in December 2017, former and current intelligence officials revealed that the actual impetus was a series of comments made in May 2016 by Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos during a night of “heavy drinking at an upscale London bar” made to a top Australian diplomat in Britain. Papadopoulos revealed that he had inside information by bragging that the Kremlin had “thousands of emails” stolen from Hillary Clinton which could be used to damage her campaign. He had learned this about three weeks earlier. Two months later, when WikiLeaks started releasing DNC emails, Australian officials alerted the Americans about Papadopoulos’ remarks.[88][89]

Other soon-discovered factors then played into the FBI’s decision to investigate Russian interference and any role played by the Trump campaign: intelligence from friendly governments, especially the British and Dutch, and then the information about a trip to Moscow by Trump adviser Carter Page. Steele’s first report was sent to Fusion GPS, dated June 20, 2016, and FBI agents first interviewed Steele in October 2016.[89] A year later, in October 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and became a cooperating witness in Mueller’s investigation.[88]

Donald Trump called the dossier “fake news” and criticized the intelligence and media sources that published it.[90] During a press conference on January 11, 2017, Trump denounced the unsubstantiated claims as false, saying that it was “disgraceful” for U.S. intelligence agencies to report them. Trump refused to answer a question from CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta on the subject. In response, CNN said that it had published “carefully sourced reporting” on the matter which had been “matched by the other major news organizations”, as opposed to BuzzFeed‘s posting of “unsubstantiated materials”.[91][42]James Clapper described the leaks as damaging to US national security.[92] This also contradicted Trump’s previous claim that Clapper said the information was false; Clapper’s statement actually said the intelligence community had made no judgement on the truth or falsity of the information.[93]

Russian press secretary Dmitry Peskov insisted in an interview that the document is a fraud, saying “I can assure you that the allegations in this funny paper, in this so-called report, they are untrue. They are all fake.”[94] The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, called the people who leaked the document “worse than prostitutes”[95] and referred to the dossier itself as “rubbish”.[96] Putin went on to state he believed that the dossier was “clearly fake”,[97]fabricated as a plot against the legitimacy of President-elect Donald Trump.[98]

Some of Steele’s former colleagues expressed support for his character, saying “The idea his work is fake or a cowboy operation is false—completely untrue. Chris is an experienced and highly regarded professional. He’s not the sort of person who will simply pass on gossip.”[99]

Among journalists, Bob Woodward called the dossier a “garbage document,” while Carl Bernstein took the opposite view, noting that the senior-most U.S. intelligence officials had determined that the content was worth reporting to the president and the president-elect.[100]

Ynet, an Israeli online news site, reported on January 12, 2017 that U.S. intelligence advised Israeli intelligence officers to be cautious about sharing information with the incoming Trump administration, until the possibility of Russian influence over Trump, suggested by Steele’s report, has been fully investigated.[101]

Aleksej Gubarev, chief of technology company XBT and a figure mentioned in the dossier, sued BuzzFeed for defamation on February 3, 2017. The suit, filed in a Broward County, Florida court, centers on allegations from the dossier that XBT had been “using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership”.[102][103] In the High Court of Justice, Steele’s lawyers said their client did not intend for the memos to be released, and that one of the memos “needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified”.[104]

On March 2, 2017, media began reporting that the Senate may call Steele to testify about the Trump dossier.[105] On March 27, 2017, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley asked the Department of Justice to initiate an inquiry into Fusion GPS, who initially retained Steele to write the dossier.[106] Fusion GPS was previously associated with pro-Russia lobbying activities due to sanctions imposed by the Magnitsky Act.[107] On August 22, 2017, Steele met with the FBI and had provided them with the names of his sources for the allegations in the dossier.[108]

Steven L. Hall, former CIA chief of Russia operations, has compared Steele’s methods with those of Donald Trump Jr., who sought information from a Russian attorney in June 2016: “The distinction: Steele spied against Russia to get info Russia did not want released; Don Jr took a mtg to get info Russians wanted to give.”[109]

On January 2, 2018, the founders of Fusion GPS, Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch authored an op-ed in the New York Times, requesting that Republicans, “release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony” and further wrote that, “the Steele dossier was not the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.”[25] Ken Dilanian of NBC News clarified that a “source close to Fusion GPS” told him that the FBI had not planted anyone in the Trump camp, but rather that Simpson was referring to George Papadopoulos.[110][111]

On January 5, 2018, in the first known Congressional criminal referral resulting from investigations related to the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley made a referral to the Justice Department suggesting that they investigate possible criminal charges against Christopher Steele, author of the dossier.[112][113] Senator Lindsey Graham also signed the letter.[114][115] Both Grassley and Graham declared that they were not alleging that Steele “had committed any crime. Rather, they had passed on the information for ‘further investigation only’.”[116] The referral was met with skepticism from legal experts, as well as some of the other Republicans and Democrats on the Judiciary committee, who had reportedly not been consulted.[114]

On January 8, 2018, a spokesman for Grassley said he did not plan to release the transcript of Simpson’s August 22, 2017 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.[117] The next day, Ranking Committee Member Senator Dianne Feinstein unilaterally released the transcript.[118][119]

Also on January 9, 2018, Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen sued Buzzfeed for defamation over allegations about him in the dossier, which Buzzfeed had published.[120]

On January 18, 2018, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released the transcript of the Glenn Simpson Testimony given on November 14, 2017.[121][122] Democratic committee member Adam Schiff stated that the testimony contains “serious allegations that The Trump Organization may have engaged in money laundering with Russian nationals”. Trump Organization’s chief counsel Alan Garten called the allegations “unsubstantiated” and “reckless”, and said that Simpson was mainly referring to properties to which Trump licensed his name. Democratic member Jim Himes said that Simpson “did not provide evidence and I think that’s an important point. He made allegations.”[123]

How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt

WASHINGTON — During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

If Mr. Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. and is now a cooperating witness, was the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration, his saga is also a tale of the Trump campaign in miniature. He was brash, boastful and underqualified, yet he exceeded expectations. And, like the campaign itself, he proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation.

While some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have derided him as an insignificant campaign volunteer or a “coffee boy,” interviews and new documents show that he stayed influential throughout the campaign. Two months before the election, for instance, he helped arrange a New York meeting between Mr. Trump and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigationinto the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.

Interviews and previously undisclosed documents show that Mr. Papadopoulos played a critical role in this drama and reveal a Russian operation that was more aggressive and widespread than previously known. They add to an emerging portrait, gradually filled in over the past year in revelations by federal investigators, journalists and lawmakers, of Russians with government contacts trying to establish secret channels at various levels of the Trump campaign.

The F.B.I. investigation, which was taken over seven months ago by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has cast a shadow over Mr. Trump’s first year in office — even as he and his aides repeatedly played down the Russian efforts and falsely denied campaign contacts with Russians.

They have also insisted that Mr. Papadopoulos was a low-level figure. But spies frequently target peripheral players as a way to gain insight and leverage.

F.B.I. officials disagreed in 2016 about how aggressively and publicly to pursue the Russia inquiry before the election. But there was little debate about what seemed to be afoot. John O. Brennan, who retired this year after four years as C.I.A. director, told Congress in May that he had been concerned about multiple contacts between Russian officials and Trump advisers.

Russia, he said, had tried to “suborn” members of the Trump campaign.

‘The Signal to Meet’

Mr. Papadopoulos, then an ambitious 28-year-old from Chicago, was working as an energy consultant in London when the Trump campaign, desperate to create a foreign policy team, named him as an adviser in early March 2016. His political experience was limited to two months on Ben Carson’s presidential campaign before it collapsed.

Mr. Papadopoulos had no experience on Russia issues. But during his job interview with Sam Clovis, a top early campaign aide, he saw an opening. He was told that improving relations with Russia was one of Mr. Trump’s top foreign policy goals, according to court papers, an account Mr. Clovis has denied.

Traveling in Italy that March, Mr. Papadopoulos met Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor at a now-defunct London academy who had valuable contacts with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr. Mifsud showed little interest in Mr. Papadopoulos at first.

But when he found out he was a Trump campaign adviser, he latched onto him, according to court records and emails obtained by The New York Times. Their joint goal was to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow, or between their respective aides.

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Sam Clovis, a former co-chairman of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, denies that he told Mr. Papadopoulos that improving relations with Russia was one of Mr. Trump’s top foreign policy goals during Mr. Papadopoulos’s interview for a job with the campaign.CreditWin Mcnamee/Getty Images

In response to questions, Mr. Papadopoulos’s lawyers declined to provide a statement.

Before the end of the month, Mr. Mifsud had arranged a meeting at a London cafe between Mr. Papadopoulos and Olga Polonskaya, a young woman from St. Petersburg whom he falsely described as Mr. Putin’s niece. Although Ms. Polonskaya told The Times in a text message that her English skills are poor, her emails to Mr. Papadopoulos were largely fluent. “We are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” Ms. Polonskaya wrote in one message.

More important, Mr. Mifsud connected Mr. Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev, a program director for the prestigious Valdai Discussion Club, a gathering of academics that meets annually with Mr. Putin. The two men corresponded for months about how to connect the Russian government and the campaign. Records suggest that Mr. Timofeev, who has been described by Mr. Mueller’s team as an intermediary for the Russian Foreign Ministry, discussed the matter with the ministry’s former leader, Igor S. Ivanov, who is widely viewed in the United States as one of Russia’s elder statesmen.

When Mr. Trump’s foreign policy team gathered for the first time at the end of March in Washington, Mr. Papadopoulos said he had the contacts to set up a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin. Mr. Trump listened intently but apparently deferred to Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama and head of the campaign’s foreign policy team, according to participants in the meeting.

Mr. Sessions, now the attorney general, initially did not reveal that discussion to Congress, because, he has said, he did not recall it. More recently, he said he pushed back against Mr. Papadopoulos’s proposal, at least partly because he did not want someone so unqualified to represent the campaign on such a sensitive matter.

If the campaign wanted Mr. Papadopoulos to stand down, previously undisclosed emails obtained by The Times show that he either did not get the message or failed to heed it. He continued for months to try to arrange some kind of meeting with Russian representatives, keeping senior campaign advisers abreast of his efforts. Mr. Clovis ultimately encouraged him and another foreign policy adviser to travel to Moscow, but neither went because the campaign would not cover the cost.

Mr. Papadopoulos was trusted enough to edit the outline of Mr. Trump’s first major foreign policy speech on April 27, an address in which the candidate said it was possible to improve relations with Russia. Mr. Papadopoulos flagged the speech to his newfound Russia contacts, telling Mr. Timofeev that it should be taken as “the signal to meet.”

“That is a statesman speech,” Mr. Mifsud agreed. Ms. Polonskaya wrote that she was pleased that Mr. Trump’s “position toward Russia is much softer” than that of other candidates.

Stephen Miller, then a senior policy adviser to the campaign and now a top White House aide, was eager for Mr. Papadopoulos to serve as a surrogate, someone who could publicize Mr. Trump’s foreign policy views without officially speaking for the campaign. But Mr. Papadopoulos’s first public attempt to do so was a disaster.

In a May 4, 2016, interview with The Times of London, Mr. Papadopoulos called on Prime Minister David Cameron to apologize to Mr. Trump for criticizing his remarks on Muslims as “stupid” and divisive. “Say sorry to Trump or risk special relationship, Cameron told,” the headline read. Mr. Clovis, the national campaign co-chairman, severely reprimanded Mr. Papadopoulos for failing to clear his explosive comments with the campaign in advance.

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From then on, Mr. Papadopoulos was more careful with the press — though he never regained the full trust of Mr. Clovis or several other campaign officials.

Mr. Mifsud proposed to Mr. Papadopoulos that he, too, serve as a campaign surrogate. He could write op-eds under the guise of a “neutral” observer, he wrote in a previously undisclosed email, and follow Mr. Trump to his rallies as an accredited journalist while receiving briefings from the inside the campaign.

In late April, at a London hotel, Mr. Mifsud told Mr. Papadopoulos that he had just learned from high-level Russian officials in Moscow that the Russians had “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” according to court documents. Although Russian hackers had been mining data from the Democratic National Committee’s computers for months, that information was not yet public. Even the committee itself did not know.

Whether Mr. Papadopoulos shared that information with anyone else in the campaign is one of many unanswered questions. He was mostly in contact with the campaign over emails. The day after Mr. Mifsud’s revelation about the hacked emails, he told Mr. Miller in an email only that he had “interesting messages coming in from Moscow” about a possible trip. The emails obtained by The Times show no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos discussed the stolen messages with the campaign.

Not long after, however, he opened up to Mr. Downer, the Australian diplomat, about his contacts with the Russians. It is unclear whether Mr. Downer was fishing for that information that night in May 2016. The meeting at the bar came about because of a series of connections, beginning with an Israeli Embassy official who introduced Mr. Papadopoulos to another Australian diplomat in London.

It is also not clear why, after getting the information in May, the Australian government waited two months to pass it to the F.B.I. In a statement, the Australian Embassy in Washington declined to provide details about the meeting or confirm that it occurred.

“As a matter of principle and practice, the Australian government does not comment on matters relevant to active investigations,” the statement said. The F.B.I. declined to comment.

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A House Judiciary Committee session last month at which Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified. Mr. Sessions was head of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy team.CreditAl Drago for The New York Times

A Secretive Investigation

Once the information Mr. Papadopoulos had disclosed to the Australian diplomat reached the F.B.I., the bureau opened an investigation that became one of its most closely guarded secrets. Senior agents did not discuss it at the daily morning briefing, a classified setting where officials normally speak freely about highly sensitive operations.

Besides the information from the Australians, the investigation was also propelled by intelligence from other friendly governments, including the British and Dutch. A trip to Moscow by another adviser, Carter Page, also raised concerns at the F.B.I.

With so many strands coming in — about Mr. Papadopoulos, Mr. Page, the hackers and more — F.B.I. agents debated how aggressively to investigate the campaign’s Russia ties, according to current and former officials familiar with the debate. Issuing subpoenas or questioning people, for example, could cause the investigation to burst into public view in the final months of a presidential campaign.

It could also tip off the Russian government, which might try to cover its tracks. Some officials argued against taking such disruptive steps, especially since the F.B.I. would not be able to unravel the case before the election.

Others believed that the possibility of a compromised presidential campaign was so serious that it warranted the most thorough, aggressive tactics. Even if the odds against a Trump presidency were long, these agents argued, it was prudent to take every precaution.

That included questioning Christopher Steele, the former British spy who was compiling the dossier alleging a far-ranging Russian conspiracy to elect Mr. Trump. A team of F.B.I. agents traveled to Europe to interview Mr. Steele in early October 2016. Mr. Steele had shown some of his findings to an F.B.I. agent in Rome three months earlier, but that information was not part of the justification to start an counterintelligence inquiry, American officials said.

Ultimately, the F.B.I. and Justice Department decided to keep the investigation quiet, a decision that Democrats in particular have criticized. And agents did not interview Mr. Papadopoulos until late January.

Opening Doors, to the Top

He was hardly central to the daily running of the Trump campaign, yet Mr. Papadopoulos continuously found ways to make himself useful to senior Trump advisers. In September 2016, with the United Nations General Assembly approaching and stories circulating that Mrs. Clinton was going to meet with Mr. Sisi, the Egyptian president, Mr. Papadopoulos sent a message to Stephen K. Bannon, the campaign’s chief executive, offering to broker a similar meeting for Mr. Trump.

After days of scheduling discussions, the meeting was set and Mr. Papadopoulos sent a list of talking points to Mr. Bannon, according to people familiar with those interactions. Asked about his contacts with Mr. Papadopoulos, Mr. Bannon declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s improbable victory raised Mr. Papadopoulos’s hopes that he might ascend to a top White House job. The election win also prompted a business proposal from Sergei Millian, a naturalized American citizen born in Belarus. After he had contacted Mr. Papadopoulos out of the blue over LinkedIn during the summer of 2016, the two met repeatedly in Manhattan.

Mr. Millian has bragged of his ties to Mr. Trump — boasts that the president’s advisers have said are overstated. He headed an obscure organization called the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, some of whose board members and clients are difficult to confirm. Congress is investigating where he fits into the swirl of contacts with the Trump campaign, although he has said he is unfairly being scrutinized only because of his support for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Millian proposed that he and Mr. Papadopoulos form an energy-related business that would be financed by Russian billionaires “who are not under sanctions” and would “open all doors for us” at “any level all the way to the top.”

One billionaire, he said, wanted to explore the idea of opening a Trump-branded hotel in Moscow. “I know the president will distance himself from business, but his children might be interested,” he wrote.

Nothing came of his proposals, partly because Mr. Papadopoulos was hoping that Michael T. Flynn, then Mr. Trump’s pick to be national security adviser, might give him the energy portfolio at the National Security Council.

The pair exchanged New Year’s greetings in the final hours of 2016. “Happy New Year, sir,” Mr. Papadopoulos wrote.

“Thank you and same to you, George. Happy New Year!” Mr. Flynn responded, ahead of a year that seemed to hold great promise.

But 2017 did not unfold that way. Within months, Mr. Flynn was fired, and both men were charged with lying to the F.B.I. And both became important witnesses in the investigation Mr. Papadopoulos had played a critical role in starting.

The Trump Dossier: What We Know and Who Paid for It

After Donald J. Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination, Fusion GPS was hired on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee by their law firm, Perkins Coie, to try to unearth damaging information about him.CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — This article was updated on Dec. 21 with more details about Fusion GPS, the company that compiled the dossier, and who paid for it.

The dossier of research into President Trump’s connections to Russia is the product of a research firm founded by a former journalist, Glenn R. Simpson.

What is the dossier?

It is a 35-page collection of research memos written by Christopher Steele, a respected former British intelligence agent, primarily during the 2016 presidential campaign. The memos, compiled by a research firm called Fusion GPS, allege a multifaceted conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to help Mr. Trump defeat Mrs. Clinton. The memos also detail unsubstantiated accounts of encounters between Mr. Trump and Russian prostitutes, and real estate deals that were intended as bribes, among other claims about Mr. Trump’s businesses.

Mr. Simpson founded Fusion GPS in 2010. The firm is paid to do research by a variety of clients, including political donors, corporations, hedge funds and law firms. During election years, the firm is mostly focused on political opposition research — digging up dirt on a client’s opponent. The firm’s website lists very few details — there is a two-paragraph description of what the firm does and a single email address.

After Mr. Trump secured the nomination, Fusion GPS was hired on behalf of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and the D.N.C. by their law firm, Perkins Coie, to compile research about Mr. Trump, his businesses and associates — including possible connections with Russia. It was at that point that Fusion GPS hired Mr. Steele, who has deep sourcing in Russia, to gather information.

In October, Mr. Trump said in a Twitter post that his party was outraged at Mrs. Clinton’s involvement.

Does it matter who paid for it?

That depends on your politics.

Republicans have criticized the dossier since it was first publicly disseminated when BuzzFeed published it in January. Mr. Trump has blasted it as “fake news” and “phony stuff,” and alleged that it is part of a broader witch hunt intended to cast doubt on his victory. His allies now contend that the allegations in the dossier are discredited by the fact that it was funded at least partially by the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. Mr. Trump asserted in October in an interview with Fox Business Network’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that the Democrats’ payments for the research were “the real collusion.”

Democrats argue that who paid for the research is irrelevant to the veracity of its claims, which they say should be thoroughly investigated. Yet some of the Democrats who funded the dossier have been wary of being associated with it. The lead Perkins Coie lawyer representing both the campaign and the D.N.C., Marc Elias, pushed back earlier this year when asked whether his firm was the client for the dossier, whether he possessed it before the election and whether he was involved in efforts to encourage media outlets to write about its contents.

In October, the veteran Democratic consultant Anita Dunn, who is working with Perkins Coie, explained Mr. Elias’s earlier response. “Obviously, he was not at liberty to confirm Perkins Coie as the client at that point, and should perhaps have ‘no commented’ more artfully,” Ms. Dunn wrote in an email.

Is this sort of research common or legal?

Campaigns and party committees frequently pay companies to assemble what’s known in politics as opposition research — essentially damaging information about their opponents — and nothing is illegal about the practice.

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However, Republicans and campaign watchdogs have accused the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. of violating campaign finance laws by disguising the payments to Fusion GPS on mandatory disclosures to the Federal Election Commission. Their disclosure reports do not list any payments from the Clinton campaign or the D.N.C. to Fusion GPS. They do list a total of $12.4 million in payments to Perkins Coie, but that’s almost entirely for legal consulting, with only one payment — of $66,500 — for “research consulting” from the D.N.C.

In a complaint filed with the election commission in October, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit group that urges stricter enforcement of election laws, alleged that “at least some of those payments were earmarked for Fusion GPS, with the purpose of conducting opposition research on Donald Trump.” The complaint asserts that the failure to list the ultimate purpose of that money “undermined the vital public information role that reporting is intended to serve.”

Graham M. Wilson, a partner at Perkins Coie, called the complaint “patently baseless,” in part because, he said, the research was done “to support the provision of legal services, and payments made by vendors to sub-vendors are not required to be disclosed in circumstances like this.”

Who else knew about the Fusion GPS research during the campaign?

Officials from the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. have said they were unaware that Perkins Coie facilitated the research on their behalf, even though the law firm was using their money to pay for it. Even Mrs. Clinton found about Mr. Steele’s research only after BuzzFeed published the dossier, according to two associates who discussed the matter with her. They said that she was disappointed that the research — as well as the fact that the F.B.I. was looking into connections between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia — was not made public before Election Day.

But word of the memos and their contents had circulated in Washington political and media circles before the election. In British court filings, Mr. Steele’s lawyers said that he and Fusion GPS briefed journalists from a range of media outlets, including The New York Times, on his research starting in September 2016.

Yet the research and even the existence of the dossier were not reported by the media, with the exception of Mother Jones magazine, which published a story in the days before the election that described the dossier, its origin and significance, while omitting the salacious claims.

How much of the dossier has been substantiated?

There has been no public corroboration of the salacious allegations against Mr. Trump, nor of the specific claims about coordination between his associates and the Russians. In fact, some of those claims have been challenged with supporting evidence. For instance, Mr. Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, produced his passport to rebut the dossier’s claim that he had secret meetings in Prague with a Russian official last year.

Where does the dossier fit in with the government’s Russia investigations?

James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director whose firing by Mr. Trump prompted the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the Justice Department’s Russia investigation, received a copy of the memos after Election Day from Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. Mr. McCain had dispatched David J. Kramer, a former top State Department official, to obtain the dossier directly from Mr. Steele. And before Election Day, the F.B.I. reached an agreement to pay Mr. Steele to continue his research, though that plan was scrapped after the dossier was published. During the presidential transition, senior American intelligence officials briefed Mr. Trump and President Barack Obama on the dossier.

Investigators from the House and Senate intelligence committees and Mr. Mueller’s team have been exploring claims made in the dossier. Mr. Mueller’s team reportedly interviewed Mr. Steele over the summer.

Mr. Simpson has provided at least 20 hours of testimony to three different congressional committees investigating the possible Russia ties. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, has described Mr. Simpson as “uncooperative.”

George Papadopoulos, third from left, sits at a table with then-candidate Trump and others at what is labeled at a national security meeting. “The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Peter Strzok,” the Nunes memo reads. (Donald Trump’s Twitter account via AP)

The FBI began its formal investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016 was because of foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos, according to a new Republican-gathered intelligence memo made public Friday.

“The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Peter Strzok,” the memo spearheaded by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes reads.

Some Republicans have argued that the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign began because of the now-infamous Steele dossier, which had salacious and unverified claims connecting Trump to Russia.

Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October to charges brought against him by special counsel Robert Mueller in his Russia investigation.

The same memo did confirm that the Steele dossier was used to justify a decision to seek a FISA warrant against Trump aide Carter Page.

Steele’s identity as an MI6 officer was one of 115 names Her Majesty’s Government attempted to suppress through a DSMA-Notice in 1999.[10][11] He returned to London in 1993, working again at the FCO until his posting to Paris in 1998, where he served under diplomatic cover until 2002.[9][12][13][14] In 2003, Steele was sent to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan as part of an MI6 team, briefing Special Forces on “kill or capture” missions for Taliban targets, and also spent time teaching new MI6 recruits.[9] By 2006, Steele was heading the Russia Desk at MI6.[4][7][15]

Steele’s expertise on Russia remained valued, and he served as a senior officer under John Scarlett, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), from 2004 to 2009.[15] Steele was selected as case officer for Alexander Litvinenko and participated in the investigation of the Litvinenko poisoning in 2006.[9] It was Steele who quickly realised that Litvinenko’s death “was a Russian state ‘hit'”.[15]

In 2017 Steele established a new company called Chawton Holdings, again with Christopher Burrows.[17]

FIFA research

In 2010, The Football Association, England’s domestic football governing body, organized a committee in hopes of hosting the 2018 or 2022 World Cups. In advance of the FBI launching its 2015 FIFA corruption case, members of the FBI’s “Eurasian Organized Crime” squad met with Steele in London to discuss allegations of possible corruption in the FIFA.[16][18]

2017 Trump dossier

Background and information gathering

In September 2015, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, retained the services of Fusion GPS, a private Washington D.C. political research firm, to conduct research on several primary Republican Party candidates including candidate Trump. The research was unrelated to Russia and was ended once Trump was determined to be the presidential nominee.

The firm was subsequently hired by the Hillary Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Committee through their shared attorney at Perkins Coie, Marc Elias. Fusion GPS then hired Christopher Steele [19] to investigate Trump’s Russia-related activities.[16]According to CNN, Hillary Clinton‘s campaign and the Democratic National Committee took over the financing of the inquiry into Donald Trump and produced what became known as the Trump dossier.[20]

In July 2016, Steele, on his own initiative, supplied a report he had written to an FBI agent in Rome.[21] His contact at the FBI was the same senior agent with whom he had worked when investigating the FIFA scandal.[9] By early October 2016, he had grown frustrated at the slow rate of progress by the FBI investigation, and cut off further contact with the FBI.[19]

In September 2016, Steele held a series of off the record meetings with journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo! News, The New Yorker and CNN.[4] In October 2016, Steele spoke about his discoveries to David Corn of the progressive American political magazine Mother Jones. Steele said he decided to pass his dossier to both British and American intelligence officials after concluding that the material should not just be in the hands of political opponents of Trump, but was a matter of national security for both countries.[22] Corn’s resulting 31 October article was the first to publicly mention the dossier, although the article did not disclose Steele’s identity.[22] The magazine did not publish the dossier itself, however, or detail its allegations, since they could not be verified.[23]

The January 18, 2018 memo by the majority (Republican) staff of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) states that as a result of the Mother Jones article, Steele “was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines the most serious of violations–an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI”[24], though this claim has not been independently corroborated and the FBI and Department of Justice have criticized the memo for mischaracterizations and omissions of fact.

Post-election work on the dossier

The project was no longer of interest to the Democrats, following Trump’s victory in November 2016.[citation needed] Steele continued to work for Fusion GPS on the dossier without a client to pay him.[25] After the election, Steele’s memos “became one of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, as reporters—including from The New York Times—scrambled to confirm or disprove them.”[25]

Compromised identity

On 11 January 2017, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Steele was the author of the controversial dossier about Trump, citing “people familiar with the matter.”[2] Although the dossier’s existence had been “common knowledge” among journalists for months at that point and had become public knowledge during the previous week, Steele’s name had not been revealed. The Telegraph asserted that Steele’s anonymity had been “fatally compromised” after CNN published his nationality.[19]

The Independent reported that Steele left his home in England several hours before his name was published as the author of the dossier, as he was fearful of retaliation by Russian authorities.[19] In contrast, The Washington Post reported that he left after he had been identified earlier in the day by the initial Wall Street Journal report.[28]

Christopher Burrows, director of Orbis Business Intelligence, Ltd., said he would not “confirm or deny” that Orbis had produced the dossier.[29]

Steele’s relationship with the FBI is generally agreed to have ended at or by the public revelation of Steele’s identity.[30][24]

On 7 March 2017, as some members of the United States Congress were expressing interest in meeting with or hearing testimony from Steele, he reemerged after weeks in hiding, appearing publicly on camera and stating, “I’m really pleased to be back here working again at the Orbis’s offices in London today.”[31]

Disclosure and reactions

In early January 2017 a two-page summary of the Trump dossier was presented to President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump in meetings with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers.[32]

On 10 January 2017, BuzzFeed was the first media outlet to publish the full 35-page dossier. In publishing the Trump dossier, BuzzFeed stated that it had been unable to verify or corroborate the allegations.[33] The UK issued a DSMA notice on 10 January 2017, requesting that the media not release Steele’s identity,[34] although the BBC and other UK news media released the information in news stories the same day.[10] Trump vigorously denied the dossier’s allegations, calling it fake news during a press conference.[35]Vladimir Putin also dismissed the claims.[36]

Ynet, an Israeli online news site, reported that American intelligence advised Israeli intelligence officers to be cautious about sharing information with the incoming Trump administration, until the possibility of Russian influence over Trump, suggested by Steele’s report, has been fully investigated.[37]

Former British ambassador to Russia, Sir Tony Brenton, read Steele’s report. Speaking on Sky News he said, “I’ve seen quite a lot of intelligence on Russia, and there are some things in it which look pretty shaky.” Brenton expressed some doubts due to discrepancies in how the dossier described aspects of the hacking activities, as well as Steele’s ability to penetrate the Kremlin and Russian security agencies, given that he is an outsider.[38]

On 15 March 2017, former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell raised questions about the dossier. He was concerned about the accuracy of the information, due to the approach taken by Steele to gather it. Steele gave money to intermediaries and the intermediaries paid the sources. Morell said, “Unless you know the sources, and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can’t judge the information — you just can’t.” Morell continues to believe that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 U.S.presidential election.[39]

Legal action

In August 2017 lawyers for Russian internet entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev, who was mentioned in Steele’s dossier, demanded Steele give a deposition regarding the dossier, as part of a libel lawsuit against BuzzFeed News.[44][45][46] Steele objected to testifying but his objections were rejected by U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Mancusi Ungaro, who allowed the deposition to proceed.[47][48]

On January 5, 2018, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, joined by senior Republican member Lindsey Graham, issued a criminal referral regarding Steele to the Justice Department for it to investigate whether Steele had lied to the FBI about his interactions with the media regarding the contents of the dossier.[49][50][51] Because the referral is based on classified FBI documents, the context in which the Republican senators allege Steele to have lied is not publicly known.[51] Both Grassley and Graham declared that they were not alleging that Steele “had committed any crime. Rather, they had passed on the information for ‘further investigation only’.”[52]

The referral was met with skepticism from legal experts, as well as members of both parties on the Judiciary Committee.[50] Fusion GPS lawyer Joshua A. Levy said that the referral was just another effort to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the election and that: “After a year of investigations into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the only person Republicans seek to accuse of wrongdoing is one who reported on these matters to law enforcement in the first place.”[50] Veteran prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg called the referral “nonsense” because “the FBI doesn’t need any prompting from politicians to prosecute people who have lied to them.”[50] Another former federal prosecutor, Justin Dillon said that “it was too early to assume the letter was simply a political attack”. The senior Democrat on the Committee, Diane Feinstein, said that the referral was made without consultation of any Democrats on the committee. A Republican aide said that Grassley and Graham were “carrying water for the White House”, but that their actions didn’t reflect the views of the committee as a whole, and that other members were upset with Grassley over the matter.[50] Grassley implied that Steele’s conduct was equivalent to that of George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn, two Trump aides that pled guilty to lying to the FBI, commenting: “If the same actions have different outcomes, and those differences correspond to partisan political interests, then the public will naturally suspect that law enforcement decisions are not on the up-and-up.”[51]

Education and business

After leaving the Navy, Page completed a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations and in 2001 he received an MBA from New York University.[10][14] In 2000, he began work as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch in the firm’s London office, was a vice president in the company’s Moscow office,[3] and later served as COO for Merrill Lynch’s energy and power department in New York.[11] Page has stated that he worked on transactions involving Gazprom and other leading Russian energy companies. According to business people interviewed by Politico in 2016, Page’s work in Moscow was at a subordinate level, and he himself remained largely unknown to decision-makers.[3]

After leaving Merrill Lynch in 2008, Page founded his own investment fund, Global Energy Capital with partner James Richard and a former mid-level Gazprom executive, Sergei Yatsenko.[15][3] The fund operates out of a Manhattan co-working space shared with a booking agency for wedding bands, and as of late 2017, Page was the firm’s sole employee.[2] Other businesspeople working in the Russian energy sector said in 2016 that the fund had yet to actually realize a project.[2][3]

Page received his Ph.D. in 2012 from SOAS, University of London, where he was supervised by Shirin Akiner.[2][10] His doctoral thesis on the transition of Asian countries from communism to capitalism was rejected twice before ultimately being accepted by new examiners. One of his original examiners later said Page “knew next to nothing” about the subject matter and was unfamiliar with “basic concepts” such as Marxism and state capitalism.[16] He sought unsuccessfully to publish his doctoral thesis as a book; a reviewer described it as “very analytically confused, just throwing a lot of stuff out there without any real kind of argument.”[2] Page blamed these failures on anti-Russian and anti-American bias.[16] He later ran an international-affairs program at Bard College and taught a course on energy and politics at New York University.[17][18]

In more recent years Page has written columns in Global Policy Journal, a publication of Durham University in the UK.[3]

Foreign policy and alleged links to Russia

In 1998, Page joined the Eurasia Group, a strategy consulting firm, but left three months later. In 2017, Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer recalled on his Twitter feed that Page’s strong pro-Russian stance was “not a good fit” for the firm and that Page was its “most wackadoodle” alumnus.[19]Stephen Sestanovich later described Page’s foreign-policy views as having “an edgy Putinist resentment” and a sympathy to Russian leader Vladimir Putin‘s criticisms of the US.[2] Over time, Page became increasingly critical of US foreign policy toward Russia, and more supportive of Putin, with a US official describing Page as “a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did”.[4] Page is frequently quoted by Russian state television, where he is presented as a “famous American economist”.[3] In 2013, Russian intelligence operatives attempted to recruit Page, and one described him as enthusiastic about business opportunities in Russia but an “idiot”.[2][20] News accounts in 2017 indicated that because of these ties to Russia, Page had been the subject of a FISA warrant in 2014, at least two years earlier than was indicated in the stories concerning his role in the 2016 Presidential campaign of Donald Trump.[21][22]

In October 2017, Page said he would not cooperate with requests to appear before the Intelligence Committee and would assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.[32] He said this was because they were requesting documents dating back to 2010, and he did not want to be caught in a “perjury trap.” He expressed the wish to testify before the committee in an open setting.[33]

Page testified that he had met with Russian government officials during this trip and had sent a post-meeting report via email to members of the Trump campaign.[37] He also indicated that campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis had asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement about his trip.[38] Elements of Page’s testimony contradicted prior claims by Trump, Sessions, and others in the Trump administration.[34][37][39][40] Lewandowski, who had previously denied knowing Page or meeting him during the campaign, said after Page’s testimony that his memory was refreshed and acknowledged that he had been aware of Page’s trip to Russia.[41]

Page also testified that after delivering a commencement speech at the New Economic School in Moscow, he spoke briefly with one of the people in attendance, Arkady Dvorkovich, a Deputy Prime Minister in Dmitry Medvedev‘s cabinet, contradicting his previous statements not to have spoken to anyone connected with the Russian government.[42] In addition, while Page denied a meeting with Igor Sechin, the president of state-run Russian oil conglomerate Rosneft as alleged in the Donald Trump–Russia dossier, he did say he met with Andrey Baranov, Rosneft’s head of investor relations.[43] The dossier alleges that Sechin offered Page the brokerage fee from the sale of up to 19 percent of Rosneft if he worked to roll back Magnitsky Act economic sanctions that had been imposed on Russia in 2012.[43][44][45] Page testified that he did not “directly” express support for lifting the sanctions during the meeting with Baranov, but that he might have mentioned the proposed Rosneft transaction.[43]

George Demetrios Papadopoulos[2] (born August 1987) is a former member of the foreign policy advisory panel to Donald Trump‘s 2016 presidential campaign. On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents about contacts he had with the Russian government in 2016 relating to U.S.-Russia relations and Trump’s campaign.

Early career

Papadopoulos was an unpaid intern at the Hudson Institute from 2011 to 2015 specializing in the eastern Mediterranean and later worked as a contract research assistant to a senior fellow at the institute.[4][7]

He describes himself as an “oil, gas, and policy consultant” on his LinkedIn page.[8] In 2014, Papadopoulos authored op-ed pieces in Israeli publications. In one, published in the Arutz Sheva, Papadopoulos argued that the U.S. should focus on its “stalwart allies” Israel, Greece, and Cyprus to “contain the newly emergent Russian fleet”; in another, published in Ha’aretz, he contended that Israel should exploit its natural gas resources in partnership with Cyprus and Greece rather than Turkey.[9] He directs an international energy center at the London Centre of International Law Practice.[10]

Beginning in December 2015, Papadopoulos served on the National Security and Foreign Policy Advisory Committee for Ben Carson‘s campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.[11] He left the Carson campaign in February 2016.[4] Following his indictment, he was described by HuffPost as “a little-known, little-qualified 30-year-old.”[12][13]

Involvement in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign

According to court records, Papadopoulos was recruited to join Trump’s foreign policy advisor team in early March 2016 by Sam Clovis. In a meeting on March 6, the official told him that one of the campaign’s foreign policy priorities was improved U.S.-Russia relations, though Clovis later denied having said that.[14] Donald Trump identified Papadopoulos as one of his campaign’s foreign policy advisors on March 21, 2016, in an interview with the editorial board of The Washington Post.[10] Trump said: “He’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy”.[4] At the time he was living in London, where he was approached by Joseph Mifsud, a professor with connections to high-ranking Russian officials.[15] Mifsud was a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, attended by Vladimir Putin.[16] Mifsud told him the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” The two met on March 14 and 21, 2016. At the March 21 meeting Mifsud brought along a Russian woman, Olga Polonskaya, who posed as Putin’s niece.[17][18]

Between March and September 2016, Papadopoulos made at least six requests for Trump or representatives of his campaign to meet in Russia with Russian politicians. In May, campaign chairman Paul Manafort forwarded one such request to his deputy Rick Gates, saying “We need someone to communicate that [Trump] is not doing these trips. It should be someone low-level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.” Gates delegated the task to the campaign’s correspondence coordinator, referring to him as “the person responding to all mail of non-importance.”[20][25][26]

Following his guilty plea, Trump belittled Papadopoulos as a “young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar” and said few people in his campaign had heard about Papadopoulos.[36][37]FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, among others, noted that during the campaign, Trump named Papadopoulos as one of his five foreign policy advisers—alongside Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, Walid Phares and Joseph Schmitz—and described Papadopoulos as an “excellent guy”.[38][39][40][41] From March to August 2016, Papadopoulos “was identified as having contacts with senior members of the Trump campaign on at least a dozen occasions.”[40] On January 22, 2017, shortly following Trump’s inauguration as President, Papadopoulos met with the head of Israel’s Shomron Regional Council, Yossi Dagan, in Washington D.C. Papadopoulos was reported to have communicated to Dagan the Trump administration’s desire to work closely with Israel on the question of settlements.[42]

Papadopoulos’s fiancée said his job on the campaign was to set up meetings with foreign leaders and that he had been in regular contact with high-ranking campaign officials.[43] She later predicted Papadopoulos’s role in the Russia investigation would be similar to that of John Dean of the Watergate scandal.[44]

Personal life

As of October 2017, Papadopoulos had lived for the past few years with his mother and brother in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.[1]

In 2013, a top-secret order issued by the court, which was later leaked to the media from documents culled by Edward Snowden, required a subsidiary of Verizon to provide a daily, on-going feed of all call detail records—including those for domestic calls—to the NSA.

FISA warrants

Each application for one of these surveillance warrants (called a FISA warrant) is made before an individual judge of the court. The court may allow third parties to submit briefs as amici curiae. When the U.S. Attorney General determines that an emergency exists, the Attorney General may authorize the emergency employment of electronic surveillance before obtaining the necessary authorization from the FISC, if the Attorney General or their designee notifies a judge of the court at the time of authorization and applies for a warrant as soon as practicable but not more than seven days after authorization of such surveillance, as required by 50 U.S.C.§ 1805.

Also rare is for FISA warrant requests to be turned down. During the 25 years from 1979 to 2004, 18,742 warrants were granted, while only four were rejected. Fewer than 200 requests had to be modified before being accepted, almost all of them in 2003 and 2004. The four rejected requests were all from 2003, and all four were partially granted after being submitted for reconsideration by the government. Of the requests that had to be modified, few were before the year 2000. During the next eight years, from 2004 to 2012, there were over 15,100 additional warrants granted, and another seven being rejected. Over the entire 33-year period, the FISA court granted 33,942 warrants, with only 12 denials – a rejection rate of 0.03 percent of the total requests.[5] This does not include the number of warrants that were modified by the FISA court.[6]

Jump up^All four were later partially granted, after being submitted for reconsideration by the government.

On May 17, 2002, the court rebuffed Attorney General John Ashcroft, releasing an opinion that alleged that the FBI and Justice Department officials had “supplied erroneous information to the court” in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps, including one signed by FBI Director Louis J. Freeh.[9] Whether this rejection was related to the court starting to require modification of significantly more requests in 2003 is unknown.

On December 16, 2005, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration had been conducting surveillance against U.S. citizens without the knowledge of the court since 2002.[10] On December 20, 2005, Judge James Robertson resigned his position with the court, apparently in protest of the secret surveillance,[11] and later, in the wake of the Snowden leaks of 2013, criticized the court-sanctioned expansion of the scope of government surveillance and its being allowed to craft a secret body of law.[12] The government’s apparent circumvention of the court started prior to the increase in court-ordered modifications to warrant requests.

In 2011, the Obama administration secretly won permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases. The searches take place under a surveillance program Congress authorized in 2008 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the target must be a foreigner “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States, and the court must approve the targeting procedures in an order good for one year. But a warrant for each target would thus no longer be required. That means that communications with Americans could be picked up without a court first determining that there is probable cause that the people they were talking to were terrorists, spies or “foreign powers”. The FISC also extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years with an extension possible for foreign intelligence or counterintelligence purposes. Both measures were done without public debate or any specific authority from Congress.[13]

Secrecy

Because of the sensitive nature of its business, the court is a “secret court” – its hearings are closed to the public. While records of the proceedings are kept, they also are unavailable to the public, although copies of some records with classified informationredacted have been made public. Due to the classified nature of its proceedings, usually only attorneys licensed to practice in front of the US government are permitted to appear before the court. Because of the nature of the matters heard before it, court hearings may need to take place at any time of day or night, weekdays or weekends; thus, at least one judge must be “on call” at all times to hear evidence and decide whether or not to issue a warrant.

A heavily redacted version of a 2008 appeal by Yahoo![14] of an order issued with respect to NSA’s PRISM program had been published for the edification of other potential appellants. The identity of the appellant was declassified in June 2013.[15]

Criticism

There has been growing criticism of the court since the September 11, 2001 attacks. This is partly because the court sits ex parte – in other words, in the absence of anyone but the judge and the government present at the hearings.[4] This, combined with the minimal number of requests that are rejected by the court has led experts to characterize it as a rubber stamp (former National Security Agency analyst Russ Tice called it a “kangaroo court with a rubber stamp”).[16] The accusation of being a “rubber stamp” was rejected by FISA Court president Reggie B. Walton who wrote in a letter to Senator Patrick J. Leahy: “The annual statistics provided to Congress by the Attorney General … – frequently cited to in press reports as a suggestion that the Court’s approval rate of application is over 99% – reflect only the number of final applications submitted to and acted on by the Court. These statistics do not reflect the fact that many applications are altered to prior or final submission or even withheld from final submission entirely, often after an indication that a judge would not approve them.”[17] He added: “There is a rigorous review process of applications submitted by the executive branch, spearheaded initially by five judicial branch lawyers who are national security experts and then by the judges, to ensure that the court’s authorizations comport with what the applicable statutes authorize.”[18] In a following letter Walton stated that the government had revamped 24.4% of its requests in the face of court questions and demands in time from July 1, 2013 to September 30, 2013.[19][20][21] This figure became available after Walton decided in the summer of 2013 that the FISC would begin keeping its own tally of how Justice Department warrant applications for electronic surveillance fared – and would track for the first time when the government withdrew or resubmitted those applications with changes.[21] Some requests are modified by the court but ultimately granted, while the percentage of denied requests is statistically negligible (11 denied requests out of around 34,000 granted in 35 years – equivalent to 0.03%).[7][16][22][23] The accusation that the FISC is a “rubber stamp” court was also rejected by Robert S. Litt (General Counsel of Office of the Director of National Intelligence): “When [the Government] prepares an application for [a section 215 order, it] first submit[s] to the [FISC] what’s called a “read copy”, which the court staff will review and comment on. [A]nd they will almost invariably come back with questions, concerns, problems that they see. And there is an iterative process back and forth between the Government and the [FISC] to take care of those concerns so that at the end of the day, we’re confident that we’re presenting something that the [FISC] will approve. That is hardly a rubber stamp. It’s rather extensive and serious judicial oversight of this process.”[24]

A 2003 Senate Judiciary CommitteeInterim Report on FBI Oversight in the 107th Congress by the Senate Judiciary Committee: FISA Implementation Failures cited the “unnecessary secrecy” of the court among its “most important conclusions”:

The secrecy of individual FISA cases is certainly necessary, but this secrecy has been extended to the most basic legal and procedural aspects of the FISA, which should not be secret. This unnecessary secrecy contributed to the deficiencies that have hamstrung the implementation of the FISA. Much more information, including all unclassified opinions and operating rules of the FISA Court and Court of Review, should be made public and/or provided to the Congress.[25]

Allegations of bias

In a July 2013 interview, Senator and privacy advocate Ron Wyden described the FISC warrant process as “the most one-sided legal process in the United States”. “I don’t know of any other legal system or court that really doesn’t highlight anything except one point of view”, he said. Later in the interview he said Congress should seek to “diversify some of the thinking on the court”.[26]

Elizabeth Gotein, a co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, has criticized the court as being too compromised to be an impartial tribunal that oversees the work of the NSA and other U.S. intelligence activities. Since the court meets in secret, hears only the arguments of the government prior to deciding a case, and its rulings cannot be appealed or even reviewed by the public, she has argued that: “Like any other group that meets in secret behind closed doors with only one constituency appearing before them, they’re subject to capture and bias.” [27]

A related bias of the court results from what critics such as Julian Sanchez, a scholar at the Cato Institute, have described as the near certainty of the polarization or groupthink of the judges of the court. Since all of the judges are appointed by the same person (the Chief Justice of the United States), as of 2013 nearly all currently serving judges are of the same political party (the Republican Party), hear no opposing testimony and feel no pressure from colleagues or the public to moderate their rulings, group polarization is almost a certainty. “There’s the real possibility that these judges become more extreme over time, even when they had only a mild bias to begin with”, Sanchez said.[27]

Appointment process

The court’s judges[28] are appointed solely by the Chief Justice of the United States without confirmation or oversight by the U.S. Congress.[29] This gives the chief justice the ability to appoint like-minded judges and create a court without diversity.[30][31] “The judges are hand-picked by someone who, through his votes on the Supreme Court, we have come to learn has a particular view on civil liberties and law enforcement”, Theodore Ruger, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, said with respect to Chief Justice John Roberts. “The way the FISA is set up, it gives him unchecked authority to put judges on the court who feel the same way he does.”[29] And Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas School of Law, added, “Since FISA was enacted in 1978, we’ve had three chief justices, and they have all been conservative Republicans, so I think one can worry that there is insufficient diversity.”[32] Since May 2014, however, four of the five judges appointed by Chief Justice Roberts to the FISA Court were appointed to their prior federal court positions by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

There are some reform proposals. Senator Richard Blumenthal from Connecticut proposed that each of the chief judges of the 12 major appeals courts select a district judge for the surveillance court; the chief justice would still pick the review panel that hears rare appeals of the court’s decisions, but six other Supreme Court justices would have to sign off. Another proposal authored by Representative Adam Schiff of California would give the president the power to nominate judges for the court, subject to Senate approval, while Representative Steve Cohen proposed that Congressional leaders pick eight of the court’s members.[33]

Judicial and public oversight

Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, has argued that, without having to seek the approval of the court (which he has said merely reviews certifications to ensure that they – and not the surveillance itself – comply with the various statutory requirements), the U.S. Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence can engage in sweeping programmatic surveillance for one year at a time.[34] There are procedures used by the NSA to target non-U.S. persons[35] and procedures used by the NSA to minimize data collection from U.S. persons.[36] These court-approved policies allow the NSA to do the following:[37][38]

keep data that could potentially contain details of U.S. persons for up to five years;

retain and make use of “inadvertently acquired” domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

access the content of communications gathered from “U.S. based machine[s]” or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the U.S., for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said in light of revelations that the government secured telephone records from Verizon and Internet data from some of the largest providers that safeguards that are supposed to be protecting individual privacy are not working.[18] Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that when courts make mistakes, the losing party has the right to appeal and the erroneous decision is reversed. “That process cannot happen when a secret court considers a case with only one party before it.”[18]

According to The Guardian, “The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access Americans’ call or email information without warrants”.[37]Glenn Greenwald, who published details of the PRISM surveillance program, explained:

that this entire process is a fig leaf, “oversight” in name only. It offers no real safeguards. That’s because no court monitors what the NSA is actually doing when it claims to comply with the court-approved procedures. Once the Fisa court puts its approval stamp on the NSA’s procedures, there is no external judicial check on which targets end up being selected by the NSA analysts for eavesdropping. The only time individualized warrants are required is when the NSA is specifically targeting a US citizen or the communications are purely domestic. When it is time for the NSA to obtain Fisa court approval, the agency does not tell the court whose calls and emails it intends to intercept. It instead merely provides the general guidelines which it claims are used by its analysts to determine which individuals they can target, and the Fisa court judge then issues a simple order approving those guidelines. The court endorses a one-paragraph form order stating that the NSA’s process “‘contains all the required elements’ and that the revised NSA, FBI and CIA minimization procedures submitted with the amendment ‘are consistent with the requirements of [50 U.S.C. § 1881a(e)] and with the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States'”. As but one typical example, The Guardian has obtained an August 19, 2010, Fisa court approval from Judge John D. Bates which does nothing more than recite the statutory language in approving the NSA’s guidelines.

Once the NSA has this court approval, it can then target anyone chosen by their analysts, and can even order telecoms and internet companies to turn over to them the emails, chats and calls of those they target. The Fisa court plays no role whatsoever in reviewing whether the procedures it approved are actually complied with when the NSA starts eavesdropping on calls and reading people’s emails. The guidelines submitted by the NSA to the Fisa court demonstrate how much discretion the agency has in choosing who will be targeted. … The only oversight for monitoring whether there is abuse comes from the executive branch itself: from the DOJ and Director of National Intelligence, which conduct “periodic reviews … to evaluate the implementation of the procedure”. At a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee Tuesday afternoon, deputy attorney general James Cole testified that every 30 days, the Fisa court is merely given an “aggregate number” of database searches on US domestic phone records. … The decisions about who has their emails and telephone calls intercepted by the NSA is made by the NSA itself, not by the Fisa court, except where the NSA itself concludes the person is a US citizen and/or the communication is exclusively domestic. But even in such cases, the NSA often ends up intercepting those communications of Americans without individualized warrants, and all of this is left to the discretion of the NSA analysts with no real judicial oversight.[39]

Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole and NSA Deputy Director John C. Inglis cited the court’s oversight in defending the constitutionality of the NSA’s surveillance activities before during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee in July 2013. Representative Jerrold Nadler, challenged Cole’s defense of the program’s constitutionality, and he said the secrecy in which the court functioned negated the validity of its review. “The fact that a secret court unaccountable to public knowledge of what it’s doing … may join you in misusing or abusing the statutes is of no comfort whatsoever”, Nadler said.[40] Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, said the secrecy that comes along with national security makes it difficult to evaluate how the administration carries out the wide authority Congress has given it. “FISA court judges hear all of this and they think it’s legal,” Kerr said. “What we really don’t know, though, are what the FISA court’s opinions say.”[18]

Secret law

In July 2013, The New York Times published disclosures from anonymous government whistleblowers of secret law written by the court holding that vast collections of data on all Americans (even those not connected in any way to foreign enemies) amassed by the NSA do not violate the warrant requirements of Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It reported that anyone suspected of being involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage or cyber-attacks, according to the court, may be considered a legitimate target for warrantless surveillance. Acting like a parallel U.S. Supreme Court, the court greatly broadened the “special-needs” exception to do so.[2]

The newspaper reported that in “more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans”.[2][a] It also wrote, with respect to the court:

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the ‘special needs’ doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures … The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said. That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law – used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints – and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects.[2]

The “special-needs” doctrine is an exemption to the Fourth Amendment’s Warrants Clause which commands that “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be and seized”. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized an exemption to the Warrants Clause “outside the foreign intelligence context, in so-called ‘special-needs’ cases. In those cases, the Court excused compliance with the Warrant Clause when the purpose behind the governmental action went beyond routine law enforcement and insisting upon a warrant would materially interfere with the accomplishment of that purpose. See, Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton, 515 U.S. 646, 653 (1995) (upholding drug testing of highschool athletes and explaining that the exception to the warrant requirement applied “when special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement, make the warrant and probable-cause requirement[s] impracticable (quoting Griffin v. Wisconsin, 483 U.S. 868, 873 (1987))); Skinner v. Ry. Labor Execs. Ass’n, 489 U.S. 602, 620 (1989) (upholding regulations instituting drug and alcohol testing of railroad workers for safety reasons); cf. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 23-24 (1968) (upholding pat-frisk for weapons to protect officer safety during investigatory stop)”.[41] The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review concluded on August 22, 2008, in the case In re Directives [redacted text] Pursuant to Section 105B of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that the “special-needs” doctrine applied by analogy to justify a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement for surveillance undertaken for national security purposes and directed at a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.[41][42][43][44]

James Robertson – a former judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who, in 2004, ruled against the Bush administration in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case, and also served on the FISC for three years between 2002 and 2005 – said he was “frankly stunned” by the newspaper’s report that court rulings had created a new body of law broadening the ability of the NSA to use its surveillance programs to target not only terrorists but suspects in cases involving espionage, cyberattacks and weapons of mass destruction.[45] Geoffrey R. Stone, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, said he was troubled by the idea that the court is creating a significant body of law without hearing from anyone outside the government, forgoing the adversarial system that is a staple of the American justice system. He said, “That whole notion is missing in this process”.[2]

The court concluded that mass collection of telephone metadata (including the time of phone calls and numbers dialed) does not violate the Fourth Amendment as long as the government establishes a valid reason under national security regulations before taking the next step of actually examining the contents of an American’s communications. This concept is rooted partly in the special needs doctrine. “The basic idea is that it’s O.K. to create this huge pond of data”, an unnamed U.S. official said, “but you have to establish a reason to stick your pole in the water and start fishing”.[2] Under the new procedures passed by the U.S. Congress in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, even the collection of metadata must be considered “relevant” to a terrorism investigation or other intelligence activities. The court has indicated that while individual pieces of data may not appear “relevant” to a terrorism investigation, the total picture that the bits of data create may in fact be relevant, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the decisions.[2]

A secret ruling made by the court that redefined the single word “relevant” enabled the NSA to gather phone data on millions of Americans. In classified orders starting in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that “relevant” could be broadened to permit an entire database of records on millions of people, in contrast to a more conservative interpretation widely applied in criminal cases, in which only some of those records would likely be allowed.[46] Under the Patriot Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigation can require businesses to hand over “tangible things”, including “records”, as long as the FBI shows it is reasonable to believe the things are “relevant to an authorized investigation” into international terrorism or foreign intelligence activities. The history of the word “relevant” is key to understanding that passage. The Supreme Court in 1991 said things are “relevant” if there is a “reasonable possibility” that they will produce information related to the subject of the investigation. In criminal cases, courts previously have found that very large sets of information did not meet the relevance standard because significant portions – innocent people’s information – would not be pertinent. But the court has developed separate precedents, centered on the idea that investigations to prevent national-security threats are different from ordinary criminal cases. The court’s rulings on such matters are classified and almost impossible to challenge because of the secret nature of the proceedings. According to the court, the special nature of national-security and terrorism-prevention cases means “relevant” can have a broader meaning for those investigations, say people familiar with the rulings.[46]

People familiar with the system that uses phone records in investigations have said that the court’s novel legal theories allow the system to include bulk phone records, as long as there are privacy safeguards to limit searches. NSA analysts may query the database only “when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization”, according to Director of National IntelligenceJames Clapper.[46] The NSA database includes data about people’s phone calls – numbers dialed, how long a call lasted – but not the actual conversations. According to Supreme Court rulings, a phone call’s content is covered by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which restricts unreasonable searches, but the other types of data are not.[46]

“Relevant” has long been a broad standard, but the way the court is interpreting it, to mean, in effect, “everything”, is new, said Mark Eckenwiler, a lawyer who until December 2012 was the Justice Department’s primary authority on federal criminal surveillance law. “I think it’s a stretch” of previous federal legal interpretations, said Eckenwiler. If a federal attorney “served a grand-jury subpoena for such a broad class of records in a criminal investigation, he or she would be laughed out of court”.[46] Given the traditional legal definition of relevant, Timothy Edgar, a former top privacy lawyer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Council in the Bush and Obama administrations, noted it is “a fair point” to say that someone reading the law might believe it refers to “individualized requests” or “requests in small batches, rather than in bulk database form”. From that standpoint, Edgar said, the reinterpretation of relevant amounts to “secret law”.[46]

Controversies

2013 NSA controversy

In June 2013, a copy of a top-secret warrant, issued by the court on April 25, 2013, was leaked to London’s The Guardian newspaper by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.[47][48][49][50][51] That warrant orders Verizon Business Network Services to provide a daily feed to the NSA containing “telephony metadata” – comprehensive call detail records, including location data[52] – about all calls in its system, including those that occur “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls”.[53] The Obama administration published on July 31, 2013[54][55] a FISA Court ruling supporting an earlier order requiring a Verizon subsidiary to turn over all of its customers’ phone logs for a three-month period, with rules that must be followed when accessing the data.[56]

The document leaked to The Guardian acted as a “smoking gun” and sparked a public outcry of criticism and complaints[47][57][58] that the court exceeded its authority and violated the Fourth Amendment by issuing general warrants.[59]The Washington Post then reported that it knew of other orders, and that the court had been issuing such orders, to all telecommunication companies, every three months since May 24, 2006.[60]

Since the telephone metadata program[61] was revealed, the intelligence community, some members of Congress, and the Obama administration have defended its legality and use. Most of these defenses involve the 1979 Supreme Court decision Smith v. Marylandwhich established that people do not have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy for electronic metadata held by third parties like a cellphone provider.[62] That data is not considered “content”, theoretically giving law enforcement more flexibility in collecting it.[63]

On July 19, 2013, the court renewed the permission for the NSA to collect Verizon customer records en masse.[64][65] The U.S. government was relying on a part of American case law known as the “third-party doctrine”. This notion said that when a person has voluntarily disclosed information to a third party — in this case, the telephony metadata — the customer no longer has a reasonable expectation of privacy over the numbers dialed nor their duration. Therefore, this doctrine argued, such metadata can be accessed by law enforcement with essentially no problem.[66] The content of communications are, however, subject to the Fourth Amendment. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held in October 2011, citing multiple Supreme Court precedents, that the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures applies to the contents of all communications, whatever the means, because “a person’s private communications are akin to personal papers”.[67]

Former FISC judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who provided the legal foundation for the NSA amassing a database of all Americans’ phone records, told associates in the summer of 2013 that she wanted her legal argument out.[68] Rulings for the plaintiff in cases brought by the ACLU on September 10 and 12, 2013, prompted James Clapper to concede that the government had overreached in its covert surveillance under part 215 of FISA and that the Act would likely be amended to reflect Congressional concern.[69]

The American Civil Liberties Union, a customer of Verizon, asked on November 22, 2013 a federal district court in Lower Manhattan, New York to end the NSA phone call data collection program. The ACLU argued that the program violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of privacy and information as well as exceeding the scope of its authorizing legislation, Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The U.S. government countered that the program is constitutional and that Congress was fully informed when it authorized and reauthorized Section 215. Moreover, a government lawyer said, the ACLU has no standing to bring the case because it cannot prove that its members have been harmed by the NSA’s use of the data.[70]

2016 presidential election controversy

In November 2016, Louise Mensch reported on the news website Heat Street that, after an initial June 2016 FBI request was denied, the FISA court had granted a more narrowly-focused October request from the FBI “to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia”.[71] On 12 January 2017, BBC journalist Paul Wood reported that, in response to an April 2016 tip from a foreign intelligence agency to the CIA about “money from the Kremlin going into the US presidential campaign”, a joint taskforce had been established including representatives of the FBI, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Justice, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency; and in June 2016 lawyers from the Department of Justice had applied to the FISA court for “permission to intercept the electronic records from two Russian banks”. According to Wood, this application was rejected, as was a more narrowly focussed request in July, and the order was finally granted by a different FISA judge on 15 October, three weeks before the presidential election.[72] On January 19 the New York Times reported that one of its sources had claimed “intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House”.[73]

On 13 March, the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded that the Trump administration provide evidence to support the US president’s claim,[74] and on 16 March the committee reported that they had seen no evidence to support Trump’s accusation that the Obama administration tapped his phones during the 2016 presidential campaign.[75]

On Fox News on March 14, commentator Andrew Napolitano said, “Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. … He used GCHQ. What is that? It’s the initials for the British intelligence spying agency. Simply by saying to them, ‘The president needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump’s conversations’ he’s able to get it and there’s no American fingerprints on this.” Two days later, on March 16, White House press spokesperson, Sean Spicer, read this claim to the press. A GCHQ spokesman responded: “Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”[76] On March 17, the US made a formal apology to Britain for the accusation.[77]

On April 11, the Washington Post reported that the FBI had been granted a FISA warrant in the summer of 2016 to monitor then Trump adviser Carter Page.[78] According to the report, “The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials.” The report also states that the warrant has been renewed multiple times since its first issue.

Composition

When the court was founded, it was composed of seven federal district judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States, each serving a seven-year term, with one judge being appointed each year. In 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act expanded the court from seven to eleven judges, and required that at least three of the Court’s judges live within twenty miles (32 km) of the District of Columbia. No judge may be appointed to this court more than once, and no judge may be appointed to both the Court of Review and the FISA court.

As of 2017, Chief Justice John Roberts has appointed all of the current judges, four of whom were nominated to their District Court judgeships by a Democratic President.[2]

The Amoral Predatory Professional Left Have the Sexual Hangups, Not the Right and Lawful Gunowners

The Deluge and Explosion of Sexual Harassment Claims Hits Epic Proportions With No End in Sight

She Said A Powerful Congressman Harassed Her. Here’s Why You Didn’t Hear Her Story.

“When you make private settlements, it doesn’t warn the next woman or the next person going into that situation.”

Originally posted on November 20, 2017, at 8:45 p.m.

Updated on November 21, 2017, at 12:58 p.m.

Paul McLeod

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Lissandra Villa

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Michigan Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives, settled a wrongful dismissal complaint in 2015 with a former employee who alleged she was fired because she would not “succumb to [his] sexual advances.”

Documents from the complaint obtained by BuzzFeed News include four signed affidavits, three of which are notarized, from former staff members who allege that Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the powerful House Judiciary Committee, repeatedly made sexual advances to female staff that included requests for sex acts, contacting and transporting other women with whom they believed Conyers was having affairs, caressing their hands sexually, and rubbing their legs and backs in public. Four people involved with the case verified the documents are authentic.

Conyers confirmed he made the settlement in a statement Tuesday afternoon, hours after this story was published, but said that he “vehemently denied” the claims of sexual harassment at the time and continues to do so.

And the documents also reveal the secret mechanism by which Congress has kept an unknown number of sexual harassment allegations secret: a grinding, closely held process that left the alleged victim feeling, she told BuzzFeed News, that she had no option other than to stay quiet and accept a settlement offered to her.

“I was basically blackballed. There was nowhere I could go,” she said in a phone interview. BuzzFeed News is withholding the woman’s name at her request because she said she fears retribution.

Last week the Washington Post reported that Congress’s Office of Compliance paid out $17 million for 264 settlements with federal employees over 20 years for various violations, including sexual harassment. The Conyers documents, however, give a glimpse into the inner workings of the office, which has for decades concealed episodes of sexual abuse by powerful political figures.

“I was basically blackballed. There was nowhere I could go.”

The woman who settled with Conyers launched the complaint with the Office of Compliance in 2014, alleging she was fired for refusing his sexual advances, and ended up facing a daunting process that ended with a confidentiality agreement in exchange for a settlement of more than $27,000. Her settlement, however, came from Conyers’ office budget rather than the designated fund for settlements.

Congress has no human resources department. Instead, congressional employees have 180 days to report a sexual harassment incident to the Office of Compliance, which then leads to a lengthy process that involves counseling and mediation, and requires the signing of a confidentiality agreement before a complaint can go forward.

After this an employee can choose to take the matter to federal district court, but another avenue is available: an administrative hearing, after which a negotiation and settlement may follow.

Some members of Congress have raised major concerns with the current system over the years, but the calls for an overhaul have grown louder in the post-Weinstein era. Members have argued that 90 days is too long to make a person continue working in the same environment with their harasser; that interns and fellows should be eligible to pursue complaints through this process; and that it is unfair for a victim to have to pay for legal representation while the office of the harasser is represented for free by the House’s counsel.

In this case, one of Conyers’ former employees was offered a settlement, in exchange for her silence, that would be paid out of Conyers’ taxpayer-funded office budget. His office would “rehire” the woman as a “temporary employee” despite her being directed not to come into the office or do any actual work, according to the document. The complainant would receive a total payment of $27,111.75 over the three months, after which point she would be removed from the payroll, according to the document.

The draft agreement viewed by BuzzFeed News was unsigned, but congressional employment records match the timing and amounts outlined in the document. The woman left the office and never went public with her story.

The process was “disgusting,” said Matthew Peterson, who worked as a law clerk representing the complainant, and who listed as a signatory to some of the documents.

“It is a designed cover-up,” said Peterson, who declined to discuss details of the case but agreed to characterize it in general terms. “You feel like they were betrayed by their government just for coming forward. It’s like being abused twice.”

Other lawyers named as representing the accuser could not be reached for comment. The Office of Compliance did not confirm or deny that it had dealt with the case.

“You feel like they were betrayed by their government just for coming forward. It’s like being abused twice.”

“Pursuant to the Congressional Accountability Act, the OOC cannot comment on whether matters have or have not been filed with the office,” Laura Cech, publications and outreach manager of the Office of Compliance, told BuzzFeed News in an email when asked to comment on this case.

Two staffers alleged in their signed affidavits that Conyers used congressional resources to fly in women they believed he was having affairs with. Another said she was tasked with driving women to and from Conyers’ apartment and hotel rooms.

Rep. Conyers did not admit fault as part of the settlement. His office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Monday, but released a public statement on the matter Tuesday afternoon.

The documents were first provided to BuzzFeed News by Mike Cernovich, the men’s rights figure turned pro-Trump media activist who propagated a number of false conspiracy theories including the “Pizzagate” conspiracy. Cernovich said he gave the documents to BuzzFeed News for vetting and further reporting, and because he said if he published them himself, Democrats and congressional leaders would “try to discredit the story by attacking the messenger.” He provided them without conditions. BuzzFeed News independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents with four people directly involved with the case, including the accuser.

In her complaint, the former employee said Conyers repeatedly asked her for sexual favors and often asked her to join him in a hotel room. On one occasion, she alleges that Conyers asked her to work out of his room for the evening, but when she arrived the congressman started talking about his sexual desires. She alleged he then told her she needed to “touch it,” in reference to his penis, or find him a woman who would meet his sexual demands.

She alleged Conyers made her work nights, evenings, and holidays to keep him company.

In another incident, the former employee alleged the congressman insisted she stay in his room while they traveled together for a fundraising event. When she told him that she would not stay with him, she alleged he told her to “just cuddle up with me and caress me before you go.”

“Rep. Conyers strongly postulated that the performing of personal service or favors would be looked upon favorably and lead to salary increases or promotions,” the former employee said in the documents.

Three other staff members provided affidavits submitted to the Office Of Compliance that outlined a pattern of behavior from Conyers that included touching the woman in a sexual manner and growing angry when she brought her husband around.

One affidavit from a former female employee states that she was tasked with flying in women for the congressman. “One of my duties while working for Rep. Conyers was to keep a list of women that I assumed he was having affairs with and call them at his request and, if necessary, have them flown in using Congressional resources,” said her affidavit. (A second staffer alleged in an interview that Conyers used taxpayer resources to fly women to him.)

The employee said in her affidavit that Conyers also made sexual advances toward her: “I was driving the Congressman in my personal car and was resting my hand on the stick shift. Rep. Conyers reached over and began to caress my hand in a sexual manner.”

The woman said she told Conyers she was married and not interested in pursuing a sexual relationship, according to the affidavit. She said she was told many times by constituents that it was well-known that Conyers had sexual relationships with his staff, and said she and other female staffers felt this undermined their credibility.

“I am personally aware of several women who have experienced the same or similar sexual advances made towards them by Rep[.] John Conyers,” she said in her affidavit.

A male employee wrote that he witnessed Rep. Conyers rub the legs and other body parts of the complainant “in what appeared to be a sexual manner” and saw the congressman rub and touch other women “in an inappropriate manner.” The employee said he confronted Conyers about this behavior.

“Rep. Conyers said he needed to be ‘more careful’ because bad publicity would not be helpful as he runs for re-election. He ended the conversation with me by saying he would ‘work on’ his behavior,” the male staffer said in his affidavit.

“I don’t think any allegations should be buried…and that’s for anyone, not just for this particular office”

The male employee said that in 2011 Conyers complained a female staffer was “too old” and said he wanted to let her go. The employee said he set up a meeting in December 2011 to discuss “mistreatment of staff and his misuse of federal resources.” The affidavit says that Conyers “agreed that he would work on making improvements as long as I worked directly with him and stopped writing memos and emails about concerns.”

Another female employee also attested that she witnessed Conyer’s advances, and said she was asked to transport women to him. “I was asked on multiple occasions to pick up women and bring them to Mr. Conyers[‘] apartment, hotel rooms, etc.”

BuzzFeed News reached out to several former Conyers staffers, all of whom did not want to speak on the record. One former staffer, who did not want to be named, said she was frustrated by the secretive complaint process.

“I don’t think any allegations should be buried…and that’s for anyone, not just for this particular office, because it doesn’t really allow other people to see who these individuals are,” said the former staffer. “When you make private settlements, it doesn’t warn the next woman or the next person going into that situation.”

Another staffer said Conyers’ reputation made people fearful to speak out against him. Aside from being the longest-serving House member and the ranking member of a powerful committee, Conyers is a civil rights icon. He was lauded by Martin Luther King Jr. and is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

“Your story won’t do shit to him,” said the staffer. “He’s untouchable.”

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said she was not aware of the settlement.

“The current process includes the signing of non-disclosure agreements by the parties involved. Congresswoman Jackie Speier has introduced legislation that will provide much-needed transparency on these agreements and make other critical reforms,” Pelosi said in the statement. “I strongly support her efforts.”

BuzzFeed News; Source: Office of Compliance

“Speaker Boehner was not aware of this,” Dave Schnittger, a spokesperson for John Boehner, told BuzzFeed News in an email Tuesday. Boehner was the speaker of the House when the settlement was made.

Speaker Paul Ryan’s called the story “extremely troubling” in a statement the morning after the story broke.

“A Committee hearing last week examining this issue led to a new policy of mandatory training for all members and staff,” Ryan said. “Additional reforms to the system are under consideration as the committee continues its review. People who work in the House deserve and are entitled to a workplace without harassment or discrimination.”

The documents also show that there was a belief among at least some staffers that the office was a jealous environment. Some of the documents allege Conyers offered his protection when staff would complain to him about management in the office.

Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images

Rep. Jackie Speier speaks during a House Administration Committee hearing on preventing sexual harassment in the congressional workplace, November 14.

California Democrat Rep. Speier and colleagues in the House and Senate have introduced legislation that would overhaul the complaint process, including requiring the Office of Compliance to publicly name the office of any member who enters into a settlement. The bill would also allow complainants to waive mediation and counseling, set up a victims’ counsel, and require all congressional offices to go through harassment training every year.

Conyers’ office has a history of ethical run-ins. In 2016, his former chief of staff Cynthia Martin pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property after she refused to reimburse $16,500 that was mistakenly deposited in her account. A preliminary investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics found that Conyers continued to pay Martin more than $13,000 per month when she was supposedly on unpaid leave.

In 2006, two former aides complained that Conyers made them babysit his children, run errands, and work on his reelection campaign while drawing their congressional salaries. There was also a bizarre incident in 2005 when 60 Thanksgiving turkeys, given to his staff to disperse to people, may have gone missing.

Conyers’ wife, former Detroit city councilor Monica Conyers, was sentenced to three years in prison over bribery charges in 2010. (One of the documents alleged Conyers began “aggressively acting out his sexual harassment behavior” following this.) Last year the couple renewed their vows. ●

If you have information or tips, there are a number of ways to securely share information with BuzzFeed News, including SecureDrop and postal mail. You can also email us at tips@buzzfeed.com or send us an encrypted message over Signal at (646) 379-1975. The best tips include specific information and documentation in addition to names. You can learn more about how to reach us here.

BuzzFeed, in an article by Paul McLeod and Lissandra Villa posted late Monday, reports that Conyers settled a wrongful dismissal complaint with a former employee who charges she was fired because she wouldn’t “succumb to (his) sexual advances.”

Citing a complaint obtained by BuzzFeed including four signed affidavits from former staff members, the report says the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee made repeated sexual advances to female staff.

They allegedly included requests for sexual favors, contacting and transporting women with whom they believed Conyers was having affairs, and rubbing their legs and backs in public.

The report goes on to bare “the secret mechanism by which Congress has kept an unknown number of sexual harassment allegations secret: A grinding, closely held process that left the alleged victim feeling … that she had no other option other than to stay quiet and accept the settlement …”

The article is entitled: “She Said That A Powerful Congressman Harassed Her. Here’s Why You Didn’t Hear Her Story.”

In an exclusive video interview recently recorded at the presidential suite of the historic Watergate Hotel, the victims of Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual assaults – Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones – blasted the mainstream news media while praising Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, as well as Breitbart News for fairly reporting on their stories.

Watch the video below:

The women recalled how Drudge on January 17, 1998 broke the story alleging Newsweekwas sitting on a bombshell news item that White House intern Monica Lewinsky was having an affair with President Clinton.

Stated Broaddrick: “Drudge was my hero. Absolutely my hero during all of that time. I could go to Drudge and know what was going on or you could go to the mainstream media, which Drudge now is. I mean they blasted him. This man stood up for us. Matt Drudge is our hero.” Willey and Jones expressed agreement.

“And Aaron, you have been very fair to us,” added Willey. “And you have told our stories and been very fair and allowed us to talk and tell our stories and that means a lot to us. Not a lot of people in the media today who want to hear our stories. Mainstream media does not want to hear our stories.”

“No, they are saying crawl back in the woodwork where you belong,” stated Broaddrick.

“Exactly. You are just women,” continued Willey, referring to what she said was the media’s poor treatment of Clinton’s sexual assault accusers. “And you are bimbos. And you are trailer trash. And you are sluts. And nobody cares what you have to say.”

“You do not matter,” stated Broaddrick. “Go back where you were.”

The three women made the statements during an until now unreleased section of an extensive video interview recorded last month.

Willey’s words about the media allegedly calling Clinton’s female accusers “sluts” were recorded weeks before “The View” host Joy Behar landed in hot water by seemingly referring to Clinton’s accusers as “tramps.”

“I want to apologize,” Baher said earlier this month, the day after she made the controversial comments. “I never, ever intend to belittle sexual assault and the women who are victims of it ever… I made a joke… I’m sorry.”

Baher made the remarks in question during a discussion about Donald Trump bringing Willey and two other Clinton sexual assault accusers, Juanita Broaddrick and Paula Jones, to the second presidential debate earlier this month.

“The View” host Sunny Hostin suggested that Hillary Clinton may have missed an opportunity to address the controversy during the second presidential debate.

“This is the thing though… If a woman sleeps with your husband, you’re not going to necessarily embrace them… That’s why when he brought up these allegations, I wonder if she missed the opportunity to address it in a way that the public would understand…” Hostin mused.

Behar disagreed, joking that there wasn’t much Hillary Clinton could say to the women.

Behar suggested the Democratic nominee could say: “ ‘I would like to apologize to those tramps that have slept with my husband.’ Maybe she could have said that.”

Eight women have told The Washington Post that longtime television host Charlie Rose made unwanted sexual advances toward them, including lewd phone calls, walking around naked in their presence, or groping their breasts, buttocks or genital areas.

There are striking commonalities in the accounts of the women, each of whom described their interactions with Rose in multiple interviews with The Post. For all of the women, reporters interviewed friends, colleagues or family members who said the women had confided in them about aspects of the incidents. Three of the eight spoke on the record.

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Five of the women spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of Rose’s stature in the industry, his power over their careers or what they described as his volatile temper.

“In my 45 years in journalism, I have prided myself on being an advocate for the careers of the women with whom I have worked,” Rose said in a statement provided to The Post. “Nevertheless, in the past few days, claims have been made about my behavior toward some former female colleagues.

“It is essential that these women know I hear them and that I deeply apologize for my inappropriate behavior. I am greatly embarrassed. I have behaved insensitively at times, and I accept responsibility for that, though I do not believe that all of these allegations are accurate. I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken.

“I have learned a great deal as a result of these events, and I hope others will too. All of us, including me, are coming to a newer and deeper recognition of the pain caused by conduct in the past, and have come to a profound new respect for women and their lives.”

Most of the women said Rose alternated between fury and flattery in his interactions with them. Five described Rose putting his hand on their legs, sometimes their upper thigh, in what they perceived as a test to gauge their reactions. Two said that while they were working for Rose at his residences or were traveling with him on business, he emerged from the shower and walked naked in front of them. One said he groped her buttocks at a staff party.

Reah Bravo was an intern and then associate producer for Rose’s PBS show beginning in 2007. In interviews, she described unwanted sexual advances while working for Rose at his private waterfront estate in Bellport, N.Y., and while traveling with him in cars, in a hotel suite and on a private plane.

Two women who worked for Charlie Rose say he emerged from a shower and walked naked in front of them while they were working at his home or traveling with him for business. Above, Rose at home in Bellport, N.Y. (Ben Baker/Redux)

“It has taken 10 years and a fierce moment of cultural reckoning for me to understand these moments for what they were,” she told The Post. “He was a sexual predator, and I was his victim.”

Kyle Godfrey-Ryan, one of Rose’s assistants in the mid-2000s, recalled at least a dozen instances where Rose walked nude in front of her while she worked in one of his New York City homes. He also repeatedly called the then-21-year-old late at night or early in the morning to describe his fantasies of her swimming naked in the Bellport pool as he watched from his bedroom, she said.

“It feels branded into me, the details of it,” Godfrey-Ryan said.

She said she told Yvette Vega, Rose’s longtime executive producer, about the calls.

“I explained how he inappropriately spoke to me during those times,” Godfrey-Ryan said. “She would just shrug and just say, ‘That’s just Charlie being Charlie.’ ”

In a statement to The Post, Vega said she should have done more to protect the young women on the show.

“I should have stood up for them,” said Vega, 52, who has worked with Rose since the show was created in 1991. “I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them.”

Godfrey-Ryan said that when Rose learned she had confided to a mutual friend about his conduct, he fired her.

Megan Creydt worked as a coordinator on the show from 2005 to 2006, overlapping with Godfrey-Ryan.

“It was quite early in working there that he put his hand on my mid-thigh,” said Creydt, who agreed to be interviewed on the record to support other women who were coming forward with what she deemed to be more serious claims concerning Rose.

She said that during the incident, Rose was driving his Mini Cooper in Manhattan while she was sitting in the passenger seat.

“I don’t think I said anything,” she said. “I tensed up. I didn’t move his hand off, but I pulled my legs to the other side of the car. I tried not to get in a car with him ever again. I think he was testing me out.”

Her then-boyfriend confirmed to The Post that she told him the story at the time.

In addition to the eight women who say they were harassed, The Post spoke to about two dozen former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Six said they saw what they considered to be harassment, eight said they were uncomfortable with Rose’s treatment of female employees, and 10 said they did not see or hear anything concerning.

“He was always professional with me,” said Eleonore Marchand Mueller, a former assistant of Rose’s who worked for him from 2003 to 2005. “I never witnessed any unprofessional incidents.”

The show’s small, informal structure, with roughly 15 employees, and the centrality of Rose’s authority on a program he owns led to uncertainty over how to respond, said the women who felt victimized. “There wasn’t anybody to report this to if you felt uncomfortable,” one of them said.

The employees worked for Charlie Rose Inc., and not Bloomberg LP or PBS, which said they did not provide human resources support for the show.

The environment brimmed with the young and potentially vulnerable, hungry for scarce television jobs. “There are so few jobs,” said one of the women who said Rose groped her. “You know if you don’t behave a certain way, there’s someone else behind you.”

Rose traveled frequently, jetting off to interview world leaders across the globe and splitting time between two New York City residences and homes in Bellport — on Long Island — and North Carolina. Often at his side was a rotating cast of young assistants and producers.

The informal structure of Rose’s small show — with roughly 15 employees — and the centrality of the veteran journalist’s authority on a program he owns led to uncertainty over how to respond, said the woman who felt victimized. “There wasn’t anybody to report this to if you felt uncomfortable,” one of them said. Above, Rose at a gala in New York on Oct. 30, 2017. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images for the National Committee on American Foreign Policy)

The young women who were hired by the show were sometimes known as “Charlie’s Angels,” two former employeessaid. Rose frequently gave unsolicited shoulder rubs to several of them, behavior referred to among employees as “the crusty paw,” a former employee said.

Rumors about Rose’s behavior have circulated for years. One of the authors of this report, Outlook contributing writerIrin Carmon, first heard and attempted to report on the allegations involving two of the women while she was a journalist at Jezebel in 2010 but was unable to confirm them. In the past several weeks in the wake of accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Carmon and Post investigative reporter Amy Brittain jointly began contacting dozens of men and women who had worked on the “Charlie Rose” show or interviewed for jobs there.

A woman then in her 30s who was at the Bellport home in 2010 to discuss a job opportunity said Rose appeared before her in an untethered bathrobe, naked underneath. She said he subsequently attempted to put his hands down her pants. She said she pushed his hands away and wept throughout the encounter.

A woman who began as an intern in the late 1990s and was later hired full time described a “ritual” of young women at the show being summoned by Rose to his Manhattan apartment to work at a desk there. The woman described a day when Rose went into the bathroom, left the door open and turned on the shower.

She said he began to call her name, insistently. She ignored him, she said, and continued working. Suddenly, he came out of the bathroom and stood over her. She turned her head, briefly saw skin and Rose with a towel and jerked back around to avoid the sight. She said he said, “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

She said she told someone in the office, and word got around. A few days later, she said, a male colleague approached her, laughing, “Oh, you got the shower trick.” The woman’s sister confirmed that her sibling had told her about the shower incident soon after it occurred.

Another woman said that during her internship in the early 2000s, Rose groped her breasts and stomach as she drove him from Bellport back to Manhattan. Her then-boyfriend, now husband, confirmed that she described the incident to him immediately after it occurred. When Rose invited her to work regularly and stay overnight at Bellport, her boyfriend told her to refuse the offer, and she did, both told The Post.

Prestige and fear

Rose’s eponymous show, with its trademark black background and round oak table, has been in production since 1991. What it lacks in mass viewership, the “Charlie Rose” show makes up for in prestige and high-profile bookings of the likes of former president Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Warren Buffett. Rose’s show is produced by Charlie Rose Inc., an independent television production company, and distributed by PBS. It is filmed at Bloomberg headquarters in Manhattan.

Rose’s stature has only grown in recent years.

CBS tapped him in 2011 to help revamp its ailing morning show, now called “CBS This Morning,” expanding his audience. He has also been a contributing correspondent for “60 Minutes” for nearly a decade. His 2013 interview of Syria’s president won Emmy and Peabody awards. (None of the women who made accusations against Rose to The Post worked for PBS or CBS.)

Representatives from PBS, CBS and Bloomberg said they have no records of sexual harassment complaints about Charlie Rose.

When Time magazine named Rose one of its 100 most influential people in 2014, billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg described him as “one of the most important and influential people in journalism.”

Rose joined “CBS This Morning” in 2011. Here, he’s seen with co-anchor Norah O’Donnell, left, and Gayle King on March 13, 2017. (Michele Crowe/CBS via Getty Images)

Rose, who was divorced in 1980, has long had a reputation as a ladies man. His “CBS This Morning” co-host, Norah O’Donnell, introduced him at a 2014 fundraiser dinner by joking, “We’re all here because with Charlie Rose, one woman is never enough.” Rose graciously accepted honors that night by saying that he was lucky to have worked throughout his career with “women who were smarter, more thoughtful and more eloquent than I was.”

There was also less flattering coverage. The now-defunct Radar magazine in 2007 called him a “toxic bachelor” and repeated an unnamed woman’s claim that Rose had “palmed her buttock like a honeydew.” His then-attorney, David Boies, who has recently drawn criticism for his representation of Harvey Weinstein, demanded a retraction. The magazine refused.

The “Charlie Rose” show prides itself on its highbrow intellectual ambition, but his life is glamorous, full of black-tie galas and famous friends. He can be charming and generous, consulting favored employees for their opinions on what to ask heads of state or whisking them off to exotic locations for interviews. But his wrath was swift and often fiercely personal, according to interviews with multiple former employees.

“Everybody is terrified of him,” said one of the women who said that Rose groped her when she was an intern. “He creates this environment of constant fear. And then he’ll shine a spotlight on you and make you feel amazing.”

Multiple women said they had at first been reassured by the presence of Vega, Rose’s executive producer, who has worked with him for decades. Two women who spoke to The Post said they repeatedly reported Rose’s inappropriate sexual behavior to Vega.

‘His poor judgment’

Working for the “Charlie Rose” show was a longtime dream for Reah Bravo, who in 2007 was a 29-year-old graduate student studying international affairs at Columbia University. She struggled to make ends meet during her unpaid internship, accruing credit card debt and eating free cereal in the Bloomberg food court.

One day, several months into the internship, Rose offered her a side gig at his home in Bellport on Long Island.

“Here is the deal: I’ll pay you $2,500 for the week plus all expenses for food, movies etc.,” he wrote to her on Aug. 9, 2007. “You will be there from Monday August 13-Friday afternoon, August 17. Your primary responsibilities are to organize and catalogue all my books and tapes and files … It will help me a lot, be fun for you, and you will have a car all the time for whatever you need to do.”

Before she left for Bellport, Bravo said Vega told her that personal time with Rose was a key to becoming part of the team.

(Obtained by The Washington Post)

Bravo said she took the train to Bellport, where she said Rose met her at the Ronkonkoma station and took her to a bank to withdraw money to cover her expenses. She stayed at the Bellport home for about a week, sleeping in a bedroom in the main house. Rose was gone much of the time.

While she was there, Bravo said she received a message from a male producer. If Rose did anything “sketchy,” she said he told her, she should not hesitate to call the show’s car service to return home.

Late one night, Bravo said, Rose returned home after a night out. She said she tried to hurry out of the library in the guesthouse to return to her bedroom in the main house before Rose came in, but he intercepted her. She said he insisted that they have a glass of wine at the dining room table in the main house.

Then, he suggested they walk out to his dock and look at the moon, Bravo said. Once there, “he came up from behind me and he put his arms around me,” she said, remembering that she felt a mix of apprehension and confusion. “It reflected his poor judgment. How could a man of his stature and his power be doing something so inappropriate? . . . It seemed reckless.”

Caught off guard, she said she did not know how to respond and endured his embrace.

A day or two later, Bravo said, Rose drove her back to Manhattan. She said he began to tell her that he felt very alone in life, despite his wealth and success. He recalled a brush with death a year earlier during heart surgery in Paris and began to tear up, and she said she patted him on the shoulder to console him.

“I didn’t necessarily buy it,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’ll keep my distance and I feel sorry for him.’ But I didn’t think of him as a predator at that time.”

Bravo soon returned to Bellport for a second trip. She was working in the guesthouse and caught a glimpse of Rose rinsing off nude in an unenclosed outdoor shower. She said she quickly averted her eyes and moved away from the window.

Later, he asked if she had seen him showering, she said, andseemed disappointed when she said no. While at Bellport, Bravo said Rose repeatedly insisted that he needed to hear that she was comfortable at Bellport and how much she enjoyed it there.

She emailed him about her work ideas and also mentioned Bellport.

“Have I told you how much I absolutely enjoy it out there?” she wrote him on Sept 1, 2007. “The company, the conversation, the comfort…that said I’m happy to go out there for both the remainder of this weekend AND parts of the next in an effort to finish the books faster.”

That fall, she traveled with Rose to Aspen for a conference. On Oct. 1, after the trip, Bravo wrote an email to Vega, alluding to earlier issues with Rose:

“On a personal note, I know working for Charlie requires one to embrace his uniqueness and develop a professional relationship that can account for it. It’s taken a couple straight forward conversations between the two of us, but I feel I’m in a better place than previously. And that’s not to say that I was previously in a really bad place! It all might sound cryptic, but you seem to play somewhat of a motherly role for staff members and I just wanted you to know that I’m okay : )”

Vega responded the same day:

“I have some concerns for you especially in what you are trying to tell me in this email. Please know the following about me, I have worked with Charlie for 16 years, so there is nothing that I haven’t heard or possibly experienced – and that anything you ever reveal to me would be kept in confidence from anyone and from the top down, so that you can feel comfortable in that confidence…”

From left: Rose, “Charlie Rose” show executive producer Yvette Vega and Beth Hoppe, a PBS executive, speak at the 2013 Summer Television Critics Association tour in Beverly Hills, Calif. Two women who spoke to The Post said they repeatedly reported Rose’s inappropriate sexual behavior to Vega. In a statement, Vega says she regrets not doing more to protect the young women on the show. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

Toward the end of 2007, Bravo was given more responsibilities and Rose occasionally paid her for helping him prepare for interviews, speeches and conferences. Her new duties required more travel with Rose, and he frequently requested her company for working dinners, she said.

Rose would regularly hire drivers to take them around town. On more than one occasion, she said, he groped her in the back seat. One time, she said, he “grabbed me by my hair, holding a fist of it at the base of my scalp.” More than once, “he would grip my head tightly while talking to me. He held it so tightly that I couldn’t turn my neck in any direction. I was forced to look at him or to let him talk directly into my ear.”

In Indiana for a speaking engagement in March 2008, Rose summoned Bravo to his hotel suite to work on his speech. While she was working at a desk in the room, she said, he emerged naked from the shower and stood before a mirror where she could see him. She said she ignored him and kept working.

Later, flying on a small private plane alone with Rose, she said he requested that they watch a documentary about Algeria on a portable DVD player. Suddenly, she said, Rose got out of his seat and pressed his body onto hers.

“I felt at a loss. I mean, what am I going to do? We were how many feet up in the air?” she said, adding that they remained clothed. “I remember him being on top of me.”

Bravo said Rose’s advance was bizarre, brief and “animalistic.” Then he returned to his seat.

“I felt an immense sense of shame that I had greenlighted his actions because I didn’t fight back,” she said.

Bravo said she locked eyes with one of the two pilots as she disembarked. She said she interpreted his expression as one of “sympathy or maybe disgust.”

Later in 2008, she was hired as anassociate producer but was already looking for another job. The same year, Bravo was offered a job that paid three times as much as the one at the “Charlie Rose” show. In response, Rose took her to the Spotted Pig, a well-known restaurant in Manhattan, and dangled a position as a producer in Washington. She could even live in a Georgetown residence where he sometimes stayed, she said he told her.

She said she declined.

“I was leaving because I was getting away,” she said. “I would never want to live someplace where he had keys.”

Since then, Bravo has worked as a corporate speechwriter and now lives inEurope with her husband and their young son.

In retrospect, Bravo said she feels shame and embarrassment about her warm correspondence with Rose.

“I read old emails, and I sound so sycophantic, it makes me sick,” she said. “But it was what he wanted, it made my work easier, and to an extent, it was the same game most staff members played. Male staffers did it, too. They just weren’t feeling as pathetic about it.”

Looking back, she is struck by how calculated Rose’s approach seemed.

“He most definitely said, on numerous occasions, ‘I’ve never forced you to do something you didn’t want to do,’ ” she said. “He would say this forcefully and wait for my confirmation after he said this. I remember once wondering if I was being recorded.”

Blurred lines

Kyle Godfrey-Ryan was in her early 20s and had taken time off from her college studies in the mid-2000s when a friend offered to introduce her to Charlie Rose. She was unfamiliar with his show but was soon hired to be his assistant.

From the beginning, there was a blurring of the boundaries between Rose’s professional and private life, she said. On her first day on the job, Rose injured his foot. She tended to him as he recovered.

But soon, Godfrey-Ryan said, he began yelling at her, calling her stupid and incompetent and pathetic.

“He repeatedly attacked her in front of other people,” recalled a former producer who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “He once said that because she hadn’t gotten a college degree she would never amount to anything better than his secretary.”

After the bouts of rage, Godfrey-Ryan said, Rose would often be conciliatory.

“It would usually entail some version of him also touching me,” she said. “A hand on the upper thigh. He’d give a hug but touch the side of the breast.”

She said she ignored his actions. Then he began calling her as late as midnight and as early as 6 a.m.

“It would be wanting to know details of my sex life,” she said. “ ‘Who’s next to you? What do you do? Is he touching you?’ And I was like, ‘Okay, Charlie, I’ll see you tomorrow.’ I just acted like it wasn’t happening.”

She said other calls involved a “very specific, repetitive fantasy” of her disrobing at the Bellport home and swimming “back and forth in the pool in the moonlight” as he watched from his bedroom.

Her boyfriend at the time, now her husband, told The Post that he was often present for these calls but said he did not know what was being discussed. The content of the calls, however, was openly discussed in the office and even joked about, according to Godfrey-Ryan and the producer who worked there at the time.

Godfrey-Ryan also said Rose would repeatedly walk in front of her naked at one of his New York City residences. Her husband confirmed that she complained to him about it at the time.

She said she ignored the nudity. “He was getting more and more frustrated that I wouldn’t engage,” she said.

Godfrey-Ryan said she reported the touching and the calls to Vega, but nothing happened.

“She just made me feel like I was being a dramatic little girl,” Godfrey-Ryan said. She stopped reporting the behavior.

Godfrey-Ryan said she eventually confided to a mutual friend outside the show about Rose, and the friend told Rose.

She said Rose fired her.

“He took me out to lunch and told me how embarrassed he was, how he didn’t treat me like that,” she said. “It was really about how I got it wrong, and, obviously, I couldn’t work there anymore.”

She later went back to school at Columbia. She has since launched her own business, Tune.Studio, which uses infrasonic wave technology to treat stress and improve moods, leading to “peace and happiness.”

“It makes me a little upset to see him on television,” she said. “Everything I experienced with journalism there made me not want to stay.”

A job interview, then denial

Another woman gave multiple interviews to The Post about her experience with Rose but requested anonymity out of concern for her privacy.

In 2009, she was in her mid-30s, looking to break into broadcast journalism after studying politics and earning her graduate degree in Europe. While working at a cultural foundation in New York City, her boss offered to put her in touch with Charlie Rose.

Rose responded with interest.

The meetings that followed, she said, were unconventional: a dinner at a restaurant, late at night with Rose’s prominent friends, where he drank a lot of wine. A sudden weekend invitation to lunch continued with her tagging along as Rose shopped for furniture. When he drove her home, she said she listened in alarm as he berated a producer over the phone.

Then he turned to the job applicant. “He put his hand on my knee and said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry about that,’ ” she said. “He said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, I’m from the South, we’re touchers.’ ”

No job offer came, but on June 8, 2010, Rose got back in touch, according to an email the woman provided. She was still unemployed and the job Rose described sounded ideal.

“He talked about this position, which he referred to as being his intellectual partner, that I would be the executive producer for global content,” she recalled.

By now, she had been told the unorthodox interview process was standard because of Rose’s packed schedule and desire to do the hiring for all positions by himself.

As part of the process, she visited Bloomberg’s Manhattan office and also discussed the job with Rose at his apartment.

“My producers come here all the time to work,” she said he told her.

She said Rose mentioned a salary of $120,000, described the job as involving frequent international travel and asked for references. Rose soon suggested they see how they traveled together by having her visit his Bellport house, she said.

On June 18, Rose sent her an email inviting her to the house that evening.

“As I mentioned, I’m going to my place on long island tonight to write…and then coming back tomorrow for a dinner. This is to invite to visit…

“You have your own wing of the house, or even a guesthouse, It’s on the water, plus Olympic pool, tennis court, plenty of movies and books and sailing and I run on the beach at sunrise and sunset…This has no influence on our dialogue about work projects.”

He added near the end of the email: “Bring someone if you like. I’m on deadline, so i will be writing all the time and will not be entertaining except breaks for exercise and meals. Let me know…before noon.”

(Obtained by The Washington Post)

Eager to land the job, the woman agreed to travel with Rose to Bellport, which is about 60 miles from Manhattan.

She gave the following account:

That evening, after stopping for dinner and getting lost, they arrived at the house after midnight. She did not see anyone else there. Rose proposed she choose a DVD of his show that they could watch together. After the show, Rose gave her a tour of the property. The guesthouse, she noticed, was packed with clutter, uninhabitable.

At the pool, Rose dangled his legs in the water andthensaid that he needed to change because his pant legs were wet. He returned wearing a white bathrobe, which was open; he wore nothing underneath.

“I thought, I’m doomed,” she said. “I was completely panicked. In retrospect, I thought of a million things I could have done.”

She said she was not intoxicated — Rose had drunk his wine and then hers at the restaurant — but said he appeared to be. It was nearly 2 a.m. and she was exhausted, she said. She also said she felt alone and powerless. It was the middle of the night, they were on his secluded property, and she did not know how to drive.

“I started talking in this feeble and compulsive way,” she said. “I started talking about power, how the abuse of power can be. He completely lost it. ‘What are you talking about? That’s certainly not the case.’ ”

She said he then tried to put a hand down her pants.

“By the time he touched me the first time, he was already very angry,” she said. “I was scared, and I was also kind of frozen.”

After that, her memory is “hazy,” she said. They ended up in his bedroom.

“I really, honestly, I’ve tried so hard, especially recently, since I’ve been thinking about this, to try to remember what happened between sitting by the pool and being in his bed,” she said.“I have no recollection of how we went from here to there. I do remember I was crying the entire time.”

He reached down her pants again, she said, and she pushed his hands away. As she wept, she said, Rose asked her, “Baby, oh baby, why are you crying?”

The encounter ended when he appeared to be asleep and she felt she could leave the room, she said.

The next day, she said there was little mention of what had happened. She described the previous night to him “as a bit of a disaster” and he said, “What do you mean?”

A few days later, she followed up about the job.

In retrospect, she said, “Remaining silent allowed me to continue denying what had occurred. It was in that state of denial that I wrote to him asking about the job.”

He replied with his regrets.

“The whole thing was really the most humiliating and most degrading experience I’ve ever had,” the woman says now. A friend she confided in at the time described her as having been “distraught” in recounting what happened.

“To have been used in the way she was left her feeling really confused and really distressed,” the friend told The Post. The friend encouraged her to write about her experience, and she chose to do so as a short story.

In one of the drafts that she shared with The Post, a tall, drawling television host named “Johnny Pose” brings a young woman to his country home on Long Island to discuss a job opportunity.

The woman said she changed some key details about what happened by the pool. And in the story, unlike in real life, she said, she viewed the host with contempt rather than fear.

She said she submitted the story to several magazine editors in 2010 and 2011. Paris Review editor Lorin Stein declined to publish the story but wrote to her in March 2011, “It has the ring of truth (alas).”

The womantitled the story, “The Hunt.” The double entendre, she said, was intentional.

“I was hunting for a job,” she told The Post, “and he was hunting for me.”

Exclusive: NYT White House correspondent Glenn Thrush’s history of bad judgment around young women journalists

Several women told Vox about their experiences with the star reporter, and the Times has suspended him pending an investigation.

New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush in the White House briefing room on February 24.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Sexual harassment claims against yet another powerful man in media inspired New York Times White House correspondent Glenn Thrush to post an impassioned note on his Facebook page in October, calling on his fellow journalists to stand by women entering the field.

In the post, which linked to an article about the latest accusations against political journalist Mark Halperin, Thrush wrote, “Young people who come into a newsroom deserve to be taught our trade, given our support and enlisted in our calling — not betrayed by little men who believe they are bigger than the mission.”

It was a noble statement — but some Washington journalists I spoke to say it rings hollow, given Thrush’s own behavior with young women in the industry.

“He kept saying he’s an advocate for women and women journalists,” a 23-year-old woman told me, recounting an incident with Thrush from this past June. “That’s how he presented himself to me. He tried to make himself seem like an ally and a mentor.”

She paused. “Kind of ironic now.”

Thrush, 50, is one of the New York Times’s star White House reporters whose chronicles of the Trump administration recently earned him and his frequent writing partner Maggie Haberman a major book deal.

Thrush and the young woman met at her colleague’s going-away party at a bar near the Politico newsroom, she told me,and shared a few rounds of drinks in a booth. The night, she said, ended on a Washington street corner, where Thrush left her in tears after she resisted his advances.

The encounter was troubling enough to the woman that her friend Bianca Padró Ocasio, also 23 and a journalist, confronted Thrush about his behavior via text message the next day.

“I want to make sure you don’t lure young women aspiring journalists into those situations ever again,” she texted. “So help me out here. How can I do that?”

Bianca Padró Ocasio confronted Glenn Thrush over text message about his behavior the night before with her friend, a 23-year-old journalist. Some messages have been redacted to protect the friend’s privacy.

Screenshots courtesy of Bianca Padró Ocasio

Thrush was apologetic but defensive.

“I don’t lure anybody ever,” he wrote, according to screenshots provided by Padró Ocasio. “I got drunk because I got some shitty health news. And I am acutely aware of the hurdles that young women face in this business and have spent the better part of 20 years advocating for women journalists.”

If Thrush is acutely aware of what young women face in the business of political journalism, he should also know it’s because he himself is one of the problems women face. Five years ago, when Thrush and I were colleagues at Politico, I was in the same bar as Padró Ocasio’s friend — perhaps the same booth — when he caught me off guard, put his hand on my thigh, and suddenly started kissing me. Thrush says that he recalls the incident differently.

Three young women I interviewed, including the young woman who met Thrush in June, described to me a range of similar experiences, from unwanted groping and kissing to wet kisses out of nowhere to hazy sexual encounters that played out under the influence of alcohol. Each woman described feeling differentlyabout these experiences: scared, violated, ashamed, weirded out. I was — and am — angry.

Details of their stories suggest a pattern. All of the women were in their 20s at the time. They were relatively early in their careers compared to Thrush, who was the kind of seasoned journalist who would be good to know. At an event with alcohol, he made advances. Afterward, they (as I did) thought it best to stay on good terms with Thrush, whatever their feelings.

“I apologize to any woman who felt uncomfortable in my presence, and for any situation where I behaved inappropriately. Any behavior that makes a woman feel disrespected or uncomfortable is unacceptable,” Thrush said in a statement emailed to me on November 19.

In interviews with about 40 people in and around media who know Thrush, I got a picture of a reporter whose title doesn’t capture his power and stature. People who’ve worked with him say he can get a writer’s name in front of the right editor, if he wants. Newsroom leaders care what he thinks. Some reporters said Thrush had usedhis connections to help them land jobs or develop new sources.

When just sitting at a bar with a powerful man comes at a price

The downfall of Hollywood titan Weinstein has been a catalyst for a movement to stamp out workplace harassment, particularly the variety to pits powerful men against much less powerful women. They are facing consequences for their behavior like never before, including men in media. Halperin lost a coveted book deal. NPR news chief Michael Oreskes resigned. Leon Wieseltier lost funding for his new magazine. And Lockhart Steele, the editorial director of Vox Media, Vox’s parent company, was firedfor misconduct.

Thrush wasn’t my boss at Politico. He was a reporter and I was an editor. We were on different teams and hardly crossed each other’s paths. But he was an incredibly influential person in the newsroom and in political journalism, a world I was still trying to break into in a meaningful way at the time.

It wasn’t that Thrush was offering young women a quid pro quo deal, such as sex in exchange for mentorship. Thrush, just by his stature, put women in a position of feeling they had to suck up and move on from an uncomfortable encounter.

On that night five years ago, I joined Thrush and a handful of other reporters for a few rounds at the Continental, a Politico hangout in Rosslyn, Virginia. At first, nothing seemed strange, until the crowd had dwindled down to Thrush, me, and one other female colleague.

Thrush tossed a $20 bill at her and told her to take a cab and leave us, “the grown-ups,” alone. He slid into my side of the booth, blocking me in. I was wearing a skirt, and he put his hand on my thigh. He started kissing me. I pulled myself together and got out of there, shoving him on my way out.

In the morning, Thrush sent me an apologetic email. I didn’t save it, but I recall it as similar to the one he would later send to Padró Ocasio’s friend in June. He said he was sorry, but he didn’t say for what, exactly.

A few hours later, I saw him in deep conversation with a number of men I worked with. My gut told me something was up. I worried he was covering his tracks by spreading a rosy version of the night. As many people told me in the course of reporting this story, Thrush is a talker — or, as many put it, “a bullshitter.” He likes to hear gossip, and he likes to spread it.

Gradually, things in the office started to change for me. Certain men in the newsroom, I thought, started to look at me differently. Some of their comments seemed a bit too familiar or were outright offensive. I had a nagging sense that I just wasn’t as respected as I used to be.

I started to think maybe I shouldn’t be in journalism if I couldn’t hang in a tough newsroom. I found myself on edge, nervous and anxious all the time. I started to believe I had brought this all on myself.

In the course of reporting this story, I was told by a male reporter who’d worked at Politico at the time that my instinct was right. He said that the day after that night at the bar, Thrush told him about the incident, except with the roles reversed. I had come onto him, the reporter said Thrush told him, and he had gently shut it down.

In a statement, Thrush denied that he disparaged me to colleagues at Politico. He said that “the encounter described [in this story] was consensual, brief, and ended by me.”

The source said that Thrush frequently told versions of this story with different young women as the subject. He would talk up a night out drinking with a young attractive woman, usually a journalist. Then he’d claim that she came onto him. In his version of these stories, Thrush was the responsible grown-up who made sure nothing happened.

There was no conventional HR office at Politico at the time (a VP of human resources position was created there in 2016). So I brought my concern about the night to an experienced colleague right after the incident. When I believed rumors were damaging my standing in the office a few months later, I told a very senior editor. I was under the impression that nothing could be done. A spokesperson for POLITICO Brad Dayspring emphasized that no formal complaint ever reached the general counsel’s desk and that both the colleague and senior editor in question had left POLITICO years ago.

Women have a very different story to tell

One former Politico staffer told me that she’d become worried about her reputation after an encounter with Thrush sometime in the winter of 2012-’13. The scene was, again, a Politico going-away party. She said she and Thrush spoke most of the night, until they ended up the last two of the party left in the bar. She says she’d had a lot to drink and Thrush offered her a ride home.

Her recollection of the details is fuzzy, but one way or another, he ended up in her place.

“I had alcohol blur,” she says. But Thrush was far from being the grown-up who preventedthings from going too far; instead, she says, she was the one to raise objections. “I remember stopping him at one point and saying, ‘Wait, you’re married.’” After that, she says, he left almost immediately. “I remember that by the time he left, I didn’t have much clothes on.”

The woman says she was struggling at Politico at the time, and she wondered if gossip might have made her situation worse. “I don’t know if he told other male reporters or editors. Did that shade their opinion of me? There’s no way to know.”

She says she doesn’t believe she was pressured or that she’s a victim.

But she also says she wants others to know about what happened.

“The only regret I have is not telling more women. I told two. What if I had told five?”

One of the two women she told at the time shared with me her recollection of the conversation. “I remember she kept reemphasizing that they were both really drunk, that it was consensual,” the friend said. “And she did not believe it was an assault. But I do remember she was very rattled and upset and ashamed of what she saw as her role in it.”

Another woman described to me a 2013 Politico party that she attended in her early 20s. She said she was standing alone, Thrush came up to talk to her, and suddenly he leaned in and landed a wet kiss on her ear.

“It all happened very quickly. And he leaned in very quickly,” she said. “At the time, I remember thinking … adults sometimes kiss each other on the cheek. Then sometimes they miss and slobber on your ear. It was my way of thinking this wasn’t as weird as I thought.”

Over time, the “whisper network” of warnings about Thrush has grown louder

A 21-year-old woman arrived in Washington last year to intern in a journalism organization. She heard from people who don’t even work with Thrush to be careful. An employee at the Washington Post told her about him when she first arrived. A few months later, she says, a reporter at Roll Call warned her about him, too. She passed on the intel to four other female interns.

Multiple young women journalists I spoke to said that they’d heard serious warnings about Thrush from friends. The word among women just starting in Washington, they said, is to be careful if you meet him at an event with alcohol, or if he sends you a direct message on Twitter. (Thrush suspended his Twitter account in September, saying it was too much of a distraction.)

There’s something endearing and inspiring about interns who self-organized to guard themselves and each other against advances offered under guise of praise and professional advice — but there’s also something sad about a world in which the savvy move is to teach a young woman not to trust an older man who has something nice to say about her work.

And whispers don’t fix everything. When Bianca Padró Ocasio’s friend found herself at the bar with Thrush in June, with him asking her to leave and go to another bar with him, she went to the bathroom and texted Padró Ocasio and another female friend, both of whom were also in journalism.

“I’m drunk,” she texted, as saved screenshots of the messages show. “I’m nervous about this Glenn situation.”

The friends urged her to call an Uber.

“I am,” she responded. “I need to go home.”

“Who else is there??” one friend asked. “Is there a woman you can uber home with?”

Instead, the woman ended up leaving the bar with Thrush, who suggested they walk off some of their drinking — get some fresh air.

He repeatedly tried to take her hand as they walked, she recalls, but she kept pulling it away. They crossed the Key Bridge from the Virginia neighborhood where Politico’s office is located into Georgetown. He led her down an incline to a dimly lit path along the old C&O Canal bed. He kissed her, she says, and she panicked. Then her phone rang, jolting her. It was Padró Ocasio.

“I felt very protective of her,” Padró Ocasio said, describing the call. “I thought, she’s drunk right now. If I don’t do something, I’m not going to forgive myself.”

The young woman ordered an Uber — the receipt shows it was about 11 pm — and says she planned to call Padró Ocasio back once inside the car. In the few minutes she waited, she said, Thrush walked back over to her and started to kiss her again. She began to cry. When Thrush saw, he abruptly walked off, waving his hand flippantly, and left her alone to wait for her ride, she said.

Glenn Thrush sent an apologetic email to a woman who had met him at a going-away party. She described an unwanted encounter with him, but felt she had to send a cordial reply and stay on good terms.

Courtesy of the young woman on the email thread

Padró Ocasio’s friend received an email from Thrush the next morning with the subject line, “Nice meeting you!” followed by, “(And apologies?).” She responded congenially. “It was nice meeting you too! (And no worries haha).” She also met him a few weeks later at a tea shop near the White House, a meeting they’d discussed the night at the bar. Thrush sent her a few critiques of her stories. She said she feels that despite her misgivings, she has to stay on good terms with him since he is connected.

“I hate feeling obligated to make him think I think everything is fine,” she said. “It’s been this thing hanging over me. I feel like I have to be nice to this person just because he knows people.”

In his emailed statement, Thrush said that the night in June with the young woman was the last time he’s had a drink.He wrote:

The June incident [described above] was a life-changing event [for me]. The woman involved was upset by my actions and for that I am deeply sorry.

Over the past several years, I have responded to a succession of personal and health crises by drinking heavily. During that period, I have done things that I am ashamed of, actions that have brought great hurt to my family and friends.

I have not taken a drink since June 15, 2017, have resumed counseling and will soon begin out-patient treatment for alcoholism. I am working hard to repair the damage I have done.

“I feel really strongly about not creating a toxic environment”

In the course of his text dialogue with Padró Ocasio about the incident with her friend, Thrush wrote, “I feel really strongly about not creating a toxic environment.”

Back at Politico years ago, Thrush’s behavior contributed to a toxic environment I experienced. Dozens of people told me that Politico has changed dramatically since Carrie Budoff Brown took over a year ago as the publication’s editor. Multiple men and women who work for her say her standards are high and she has no time for the kind of behavior I described.

Budoff Brown was at the going-away party in June where Thrush was in the booth with the 23-year-old woman. She told me she noticed them talking but, like other attendees I talked to, she didn’t know that anything happened afterward.

“I was disappointed in Glenn but had no reason to think that anything would progress beyond the bar that night,” she said. “And I am saddened to learn in the course of your reporting that it did.”

“Great journalism and great business require a great workplace. My colleagues and I have worked hard to nurture a newsroom where people are supportive, good to each other, and where mutual respect is the way of life. We have zero tolerance for anything else.”

New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush inside the White House briefing room on February 24.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

By the time of the June incident, Thrush was gone from Politico anyway — off to the New York Times, which has hired many of Politico’s top reporters over the years. But now he will be on hiatus pending a Times investigation that was sparked by my reporting for this story.

“The behavior attributed to Glenn in this Vox story is very concerning and not in keeping with the standards and values of The New York Times,” said Eileen Murphy, the senior vice president of communications for the New York Times, in a written statement. “We intend to fully investigate and while we do, Glenn will be suspended. We support his decision to enter a substance abuse program. In the meantime, we will not be commenting further.”

It’s the Times itself, of course, that has done so much to spark the current conversation around harassment with its exposés on Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K. There’s probably no loftier perch in all of political journalism from which one could teach the trade and enlist young women into the calling — or, as the case may be, betray them.

Lindsay Menz, a 33-year-old woman who now lives in Frisco, Texas, reached out to CNN on Thursday hours after Tweeden made her story public. Menz said she wanted to share an “uncomfortable” interaction that left her feeling “gross.”

According to Menz, she attended the Minnesota State Fair with her husband and father in the summer of 2010, almost two years after Franken was elected to the Senate. Her father’s small business was sponsoring a local radio booth, and she spent the day meeting various elected officials, political candidates and celebrities and taking photos with them as they stopped by the booth.

When Franken walked in, Menz and her husband, who also spoke with CNN, said they recognized him right away. Menz said she had a brief and cordial exchange with the senator.

Then, as her husband held up her phone and got ready to snap a photo of the two of them, Franken “pulled me in really close, like awkward close, and as my husband took the picture, he put his hand full-fledged on my rear,” Menz said. “It was wrapped tightly around my butt cheek.”

“It wasn’t around my waist. It wasn’t around my hip or side. It was definitely on my butt,” she said, recalling that the brazen act lasted three or four seconds. “I was like, oh my God, what’s happening.”

“He reached around her and kind of pulled her into him,” said her husband Jeremy Menz, who didn’t see what happened behind his wife. “He pulled her in and pushed his head against her head. It was over pretty quick.”

Lindsay Menz told CNN that she walked away as soon as the photo was taken, without saying anything to the then-first term senator. When she reconnected with her husband moments later, she told him: “He totally grabbed my butt.” Jeremy Menz described that conversation the same way to CNN.

In a statement to CNN Sunday, Franken said he did not remember taking the photo with Menz and that he felt “badly” that she felt disrespected.

“I take thousands of photos at the state fair surrounded by hundreds of people, and I certainly don’t remember taking this picture,” Franken said. “I feel badly that Ms. Menz came away from our interaction feeling disrespected.”

“I felt gross. It’d be like being walking through the mall and some random person grabbing your butt,” Lindsay Menz said. “You just feel gross. Like ew, I want to wash that off of me.”

“I was upset. I wasn’t happy about it in the least,” Jeremy Menz said. “He was already gone and I wasn’t going to confront him. But yeah — I was in shock, really.”

Menz’s father, Mark Brown, was also in the radio booth that day but didn’t witness the moment. But he told CNN that his daughter told him about the incident right away.

Menz’s mother, Jodi Brown, also told CNN that she discussed the incident with her daughter immediately after it happened. She said she distinctly recalls her son-in-law saying to her: “Our senator just groped my wife right in front of me.”

In the photo of Menz and Franken, the side of the senator’s face is pressed up against Menz’s but the lower halves of their bodies are not shown. Both of them are smiling.

Menz posted the photo with Franken on Facebook at the time, on August 27, 2010. Her sister, Cari Thunker, commented under the photo: “Sorry, but you two aren’t Bibles (sic) width apart” — a reference, Thunker explained to CNN, to how physically close Menz and Franken were in the photo.

Minnesota statutes state that “intentional touching of the clothing covering the immediate area of the buttocks” is not considered criminal sexual conduct.

Menz told CNN that what happened immediately after she took the photo with Franken that summer day in 2010 has also stayed with her. Standing nearby was another politician — then-Minnesota Rep. John Kline.

As she was getting ready to take a picture with Kline, Menz said the congressman asked her whether they should “mutually put our arms around each other” — an interaction that struck her as being in stark contrast with what she had experienced moments ago with Franken.

Reached on the phone on Friday, Kline, a Republican who retired from Congress this year, confirmed that he attended the Minnesota State Fair in 2010, as he did most years. Kline could not remember seeing the interaction between Menz and Franken. But when CNN described Menz’s recollection of her interaction with Kline before they took a photo together, he told CNN: “As a matter of practice, I did that all the time.”

“If somebody wanted a picture, I would ask: should I put my arm on your back or your shoulder?” Kline said. He said that as a congressman, he was particularly inclined to do this when taking photos with women.

Lindsay and Jeremy Menz moved from Minnesota to Texas in 2014. Lindsay Menz is now a stay-at-home-mom of three young kids. Neither is registered with a political party and she said she has equally supported Republican and Democratic candidates while he said he has tended to favor Republicans. The couple voted last year for Donald Trump, and Menz said she has voted for Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is a Democrat, in the past. Menz said she believes she has voted for Franken as well, but is not sure.

When Menz saw the news of Tweeden’s allegations against Franken on Thursday, she immediately discussed her own run-in with the senator from 2010 with her family. She also posted about it on Twitter and Facebook.

A friend encouraged Menz to contact a CNN reporter after seeing the network’s coverage of sexual harassment in recent days. Menz was emphatic that she “absolutely” would not have decided to share her story had Tweeden not done the same.

“I don’t want to paint my story in the same light as hers,” Menz said, saying she believes what happened to Tweeden is much worse.

Still, she said, “the reason I want to say something is if someone sees that I said something, maybe it would give them the courage to say something too.”

Franken has not made further statements to the press since releasing two apologies on Thursday. He has said he intends to fully cooperate if there is a Senate Ethics Committee investigation into his behavior.

“I respect women. I don’t respect men who don’t. And the fact that my own actions have given people a good reason to doubt that makes me feel ashamed,” he said in a statement. “I understand why we need to listen to and believe women’s experiences.”

Story 2: A Two Charlie Day — Charlie Rose, Should Be Fired By CBS, and Charlie Manson, Dead At 83, Should Have Been Executed By State of California — Remember One of The Victims — Sharon Tate — Videos

Notorious cult leader Charles Manson dead at 83

Charles Manson Interview with Tom Snyder (Complete)

Charles Manson Interview with Charlie Rose on Nightwatch (Complete)

Charles Manson – Dianne Sawyer Documentary

Charlie Manson Exposes Illuminati Methods

Published on Jan 28, 2013

Some choice clips from 20 years of media interviews with Charlie Manson. I hope this shows some of you just how intelligent and ahead of his time this man was. The story about Manson that media has jumped through hoops to avoid is a 100x more interesting.

Check out the work of Dave McGowan, only Manson and the satanic Hollwood elite controlling the music, film, & TV industry at that time. SO many more millions are awakened in this past decade thanks to 9-11. By all the fake “9-11 truth” groups that we know now were cointel and disinfo franchises sponsored and employed by intelligent agencies for both the federal government and military intelligence. Not only that, more private mercenaries were employed than actual US soldiers, almost all to guard the same people trying to have guns taken away from the middle class.

Los Angelino, Dave McGowan, author of “Programmed to Kill”, has written a never-before seen expose of all the ’60’s rock stars and how they all were sons and daughters of high ranking military brass, many claimed to be satanists themselves by surviving victims who swore under oath in front of a judge and US Grand Jury.

Victim in Roman Polanski sexual assault wants case dropped

Swiss prosecutors said Monday that they will examine allegations made by a German woman that filmmaker Roman Polanski raped her in 1972 in the town of Gstaad, when she was 15.The procedural move means that Switzerland has not ruled out prosecuting the filmmaker, despite questions as to whether the statute of limitations for the alleged crime has lapsed.Renate Langer, a 61-year-old former actress, told Swiss police last month that she met Polanski while working as a model in Munich before travelling to his home in Gstaad, where he raped her.’The prosecutor’s office in the Canton of Bern has confirmed … it will handle (the file)’, prosecution spokesman Christof Scheurer said in an email.Langer is the fourth woman to publicly accuse Polanski of sexual assault.Polanski pleaded guilty in the United States to having unlawful sex with Samantha Geimer – aged 13 at the time – in 1977 but fled the country before he could be sentenced. He remains a fugitive from the US justice system.British actress Charlotte Lewis also accused Polanski of assault in 2010. Lewis claimed the director ‘forced himself’ upon her just after her 16th birthday.In August, a woman identified only as Robin told a news conference in Los Angeles she was ‘sexually victimized’ by the French-Polish film director when she was 16, in 1973.Polanski’s film career has continued to flourish since he fled the US for France, where many consider him an icon.He has eight Cesars – the French equivalent of an Oscar – as well as a best director Academy Award for Holocaust drama ‘The Pianist.’

Manson — who infamously wore a swastika tattoo between his eyebrows — had spent more than 45 years in prison after being convicted of directing his “Manson Family” clan of troubled, mostly female, followers to kill seven people in California in the summer of 1969. The dead included actress Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, who was stabbed 16 times.

“I am crime,” Manson proudly proclaimed during a collect call to The Post from prison in the mid-2000s.

Born on Nov. 12, 1934, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a prostitute named Kathleen Maddox, Manson was officially dubbed “no name Maddox” at birth and apparently never knew his biological father.

From a very young age, Manson was a self-styled “outlaw” who took pride in being a criminal and reveled in all the mayhem he caused.

Manson committed his first crimes at around 13 years old, robbing liquor stores to scrounge together enough money to eat and rent motel rooms.

During his teenage years, Manson was in-and-out of juvenile halls and was placed in the Indiana Boys School, where he was sexually assaulted before he escaped in 1951, according to a book, “Manson In His Words,” by Nuel Emmons.

Between 1951 and 1955, Manson was repeatedly arrested for a variety of federal and state offenses, including stealing cars and robbing gas stations.

He was sent to reformatories, but none of them could wean him off his appetite for trouble.

By 1957, Manson was doing hard time in the federal prison at Terminal Island in Los Angeles for violating his probation after he was caught stealing a car and driving it over state lines.

He was eventually paroled, but started a career as a pimp and tried to cash forged US Treasury checks.

Manson found himself back at Terminal Island, where, on March 21, 1967 – the day of his release – he pleaded with prison officials to keep him there because he had been institutionalized for most of his life up to that point.

The wild-eyed, gnome-like figure ended up staying in Los Angeles, where he wrote and played music with a guitar – and began a hippie cult that drew tough men and disaffected suburban young women.

But Manson’s inability to build a musical career led him to an even darker path.

Manson hung out with Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson and the band’s record producer, Terry Melcher, but the latter refused to give him a record deal.

Furious, Manson put together a plan to exact his revenge, ordering several of his drug-addled, brainwashed followers to kill everyone inside Melcher’s former residence.

Despite knowing that Melcher no longer lived there, Manson specifically chose that location because it represented the music industry that had snubbed him.

Just as importantly, Manson, who harbored bizarre racist theories and philosophies, wanted to start a race war – something he called “Helter Skelter,” named after the Beatles song by the same name.

Polanski was overseas shooting a movie at the time, but Tate was hosting a low-key party with friends, including hair stylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and her boyfriend, Wojciech Frykowski.

First, the killers fatally shot Steven Parent, who had been visiting a caretaker on the property. They then butchered to death Tate, Sebring, Folger and Frykowski.

The next night, Manson directed Watson, Krenwinkel, Atkins and another follower, Leslie Van Houten, to murder supermarket magnate Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary LaBianca, in their Los Feliz home.

In the decades since the murders, Manson has become an icon for troubled youth and a fixture in pop culture.

Charles Manson is escorted to his arraignment on conspiracy-murder charges in connection with the Sharon Tate murder case in 1969.AP

There have been numerous books written about the “Manson Murders,” as well as movies and documentaries detailing the case.

Manson himself reached almost mythical status through his strange and colorful prison interviews with notable media types, including Charlie Rose, Diane Sawyer and Geraldo Rivera.

In his final years in prison, Manson almost married Afton “Star” Burton, who moved from Mississippi to Corcoran just to be with him.

Although they filed for a marriage license, Manson never got hitched to the woman who is more than 50 years his junior.
No one who carried out murders at Manson’s behest has has ever been released from prison.

Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten remained locked up in California while Atkins died in prison in 1989.

A board granted Van Houten – who at 19 was the youngest of the killers – parole in September.

But the ruling is still under review and California Gov. Jerry Brown will get to uphold, reject or modify the finding of parole early next year.

Sharon Marie Tate Polanski (January 24, 1943 – August 9, 1969) was an American actress and model. During the 1960s, she played small television roles before appearing in films and was regularly featured in fashion magazines as a model and cover girl. After receiving positive reviews for her comedic and dramatic acting performances, Tate was hailed as one of Hollywood‘s most promising newcomers.

On January 20, 1968, Tate married Roman Polanski, her director and co-star in 1967’s The Fearless Vampire Killers. On August 9, 1969, Tate and four others were murdered by members of the Manson Family in the home she shared with Polanski. At the time of her death, she was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with the couple’s son.

A decade after Tate’s murder, the actress’ mother, Doris Tate, in response to the growing cult status of the killers and the possibility of them being granted parole, organized a public campaign that resulted in amendments to the California criminal law. Tate’s mother went on to say that the law would “help transform Sharon’s legacy from murder victim to a symbol of victims’ rights”. A book by Tate’s sister, Debra Tate,[3] titled Sharon Tate: Recollection, was released in 2014.[4]

Life and career

Childhood and early acting career

Sharon Tate was born in Dallas, Texas, the eldest of three daughters, to Colonel Paul James Tate (1922–2005),[5] a United States Army officer, and his wife, Doris Gwendolyn (née Willett). At six months of age, Tate won the “Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas Pageant”, but her parents had no show business ambitions for their daughter. Paul Tate was promoted and transferred several times. By the age of 16, as a military brat, Tate had lived in six different cities, and she reportedly found it difficult to maintain friendships. Her family described her as shy and lacking in self-confidence. As an adult, Tate commented that people would misinterpret her shyness as aloofness until they knew her better.[6]

Tate attended Chief Joseph Junior High School (now Chief Joseph Middle School) from September 1955 to June 1958, and Columbia High School (now Richland High School) in Richland, Washington from September 1958 to October 1959. She attended Irvin High School in El Paso, Texas, from late fall 1959 to April 1960; and Vicenza American High School in Vicenza, Italy, from April to June 1960. She graduated from Vicenza American High School in 1961.

As she matured, people commented on Tate’s beauty; she began entering beauty pageants, winning the title of “Miss Richland” in Washington in 1959. She spoke of her ambition to study psychiatry, and also stated her intention to compete in the “Miss Washington” pageant in 1960, however, before she could do either, her father received orders to be stationed in Italy. With the family relocating in Verona, Tate learned that she had become a local celebrity owing to the publication of a photograph of her in a bathing suit on the cover of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. She discovered a kinship with other students at the American school she attended in nearby Vicenza, recognizing that their backgrounds and feelings of separation were similar to her own, and for the first time in her life began to form lasting friendships.

Tate and her friends became interested in the filming of Adventures of a Young Man, which was being made nearby with Paul Newman, Susan Strasberg, and Richard Beymer, and obtained parts as film extras. Beymer noticed Tate in the crowd and introduced himself, and the two dated during the production of the film, with Beymer encouraging Tate to pursue a film career. In 1961, Tate was employed by the singer Pat Boone and appeared with him in a television special he made in Venice.[which?][citation needed]

Sharon Tate (at right wearing a dark wig) as Janet Trego in the 1964 “Giant Jackrabbit” episode of The Beverly Hillbillies with Max Baer, Jr. and Nancy Kulp